plonq | Year in Pictures: 2010/03/05

"Hang on, I don't want to forget the camera this time; that's an interesting little coffee shop and I'm sure I can get a good PoTD there."

Instead of the coffee shop, my picture ended up being the black cherry mocha in my hand - and yes, it was just as good as it sounds.

There was no pre-planning involved in this picture. I took the camera along in case something photo-worthy showed up, and while I was cleaning the lens I happened to notice that my mocha had a nice, photogenic swirl on the top. Going forward I am not going to bother mentioning the ISO that I used unless it's something other than 100.

I took two pictures; the first (this one) was at f/4.0 @ 1/60th of a second, the second was at f/3.3 @ 1/90th of a second. The second shot had a slightly better composition, but it was blurry - and not because of its depth of field; the camera simply focused on the wrong thing in the picture. Ah well. I cropped a little off the top to give the picture more aesthetic dimensions, tweaked the exposure just a bit, and then did a gradiant overlay to convert it to B&W. Finally I grabbed a medium brush and painted out the portion inside the cup to bring back its colour.

The topping is actually a tad under-saturated as well, but I wanted the colouring to be fairly subtle in this picture.