This was a very simple and fun product shot. The bowl and the soup and the background all worked very well together, and the lighting was very simple (it typicall is for these shots). Oh, yeah, the egg… I find eggshells endlessly fascinating and quite anthropomorphic, if sometimes creepy. Maybe it’s just an eggshell in a bowl of matso soup with wild mushrooms. But don’t you hear that faint, far-off wail?

The only odd thing about this shot, technically, was the amount of repairs to the background I had to make. This is a relatively new background, and it looks pristine. But Pentax glass is so good, that even the smallest imperfection or bit of debris and specks of dust (things much smaller than half an eyelash, for instance), had to be cloned out. I must have made over 50 repairs to that background.

Here’s the big Flickr version.

Meta: Pentax K-3, 35mm f/2.8 macro, @f/9, ISO 100, 1/180th of a second, key light, reflector, 2-image composite