Coffee Beans

I emptied a pack of fresh coffee beans yesterday and decided to make a mini-pictorial of it. I have no studio or a clean white table to use as background so I taped sheets of bond papers together and plated it on my study table.

Here's what I've came up with the beans.

This type of shoot (using taped bond papers as background) is what I always use with my subjects at home when I shoot something for my food blog foodiecraft.com, even before I bought a DSLR.

Over here, I was aiming for a sharper look of that inclined bean but my camera couldn't do anymore better since I only have a kit lens. The lens wouldn't sharpen the bean as much as I wanted it to.

I thought of so many appealing poses and positions of my Starbucks steel barrel mug but since it was too shiny and it reflected nearly 90 degrees of my room, I decided to keep those particular shots to myself. Here are the ones that didn't show much of what the mug was fronting while I did the shoot.

I cheated the quantity of the beans for this shot. I crumpled a piece of clean parchment and placed it inside my mug close to the rim but not too much that it peaked out. I poured a handful of beans on top of it and gathered the rest around the bottom of the mug.

As you can see, the reflection of the mug isn't that nice. It would have been better if I had a mug that isn't glossy or so. But I decided to show you guys this shot anyway. Haha.

Here's another shot that made me frustrated. I don't have a macro lens so I couldn't achieve what I was truly aiming for: a single bean shot. I wanted it to be very sharp and a little dramatic with shadow but my camera just couldn't do it. I've struggled moving myself near and far from the subject but to no avail.

The set-up.