Copyright © 2005 Josh Audette

I don't really get anything from this photo, except maybe a sad, "the cup is empty" sorta feeling. I should have put some really cold water in it, then focused hard on the condensation. That would have been refreshing.

For a photo that does nothing for me, I sure spent a heck of a lot of effort on it. The setup and shoot took about 20 minutes, and another half hour in the digital darkroom.

The setup is an excercise in cheap ingenuity. The stage was a TV dinner table with a white T-shirt thrown over it. A microphone stand with the boom locked horizontally had a T-shirt pinned to it, making the backdrop - even the shirt's pins were scavenged from a pile of those pins that new dress shirts come with. A spotlight (part of a tortiere lamp) was aimed at the backdrop from behind; a CF bulb (borrowed from the reading room) in an open lamp socket shone light from the side. The photo was taken on a tripod with a 1" exposure time, using a number of different f/stops to give me options for exposure. Setup and shooting took about 20 min.

Post-processing took about 30 min. The magic wand got rid of most of the backdrop. Touching up the edges with the fuzzy paintbrush took the most time. Then I did some colour correction on the upper part of the goblet - the light shining through the shirt, er, backdrop was too yellow as it shone through the glass.