Thanks all for the feedback......
Denniskee and Peterpan1975 and myself were having a coffee at this coffee shop when we were figuring out how best to capture its character ..... so we focussed on its essence
- the ah pek
- glass cups
- keep the light levels low (inside the coffeeshop IS poorly lit )
- some semblence of order amongst the grottiness (gritty mirror, shelf etc)
thanks for the feeback of sepia vs BW ..... tried that but lost stuff in the shadows, thats why i did not dare kick up the contrast and stick to sepia-ish tone ..... was walking on VERY thin ice ...... too much flash and the background becomes excessively cluttered and I did not want that to compete with the foreground (anchoring element)
soy sauce bottle was delibrately left in the image composition to tell its own little story
the face was over exposed because the flash unit was just too close to the face (even with a diffuser attached and dialed down to 1/16 ) .... my bad, but could not be helped because I was all stretched out with the right arm holding camera and framing the image while my left arm was not rubbery enough to the flash further back