I seems to like to take pictures of my toys, mostly shaving gear, but also espresso... So this's an extraction I did yesterday, it was a good one, for this coffee (not the best or the freshest, but I'm to cheap to through it away):

beautiful photos! I have messed around slightly with extraction photos but I have never produced a good looking photo. Often not bright enough under the machine, or too bright when I use a lamp. I'm curious to know what your setup is for these photos. Lighting, tripod or handheld, aperture, shutter speed, iso? My wife is a photographer but no interest in coffee, except to drink it. So I'm left fumbling with her camera and not having a clue what to do!

Thank you! Hand held, but I use the zinc as support for my elbows. I use a Nikon D90 with a Nikkor Miccro 60 mm lens and then I "lift" the pictures slightly in Windows Live Photo Gallery (sharpen, lift the contrast and up the light a little and that's it, goes really fast now).

Light: my machine stands close to the kitchen door (with a big window and towards the garden), but it works great with automatic settings and only the light from the kitchen lamps too (this winter has been long and dark, again )

Just pulled another shot :

Nice shots, Mikael. My stale beans don't look that good.

Jonny, here's my quick and dirty method to get even lighting using your wife's SLR camera and flash setup:

- Attach the external flash to the hotshoe and rotate the head straight up. There should be a white card on any pro level flashes so pull it straight out. If you don't have a white ceiling, point the flash at the side walls or straight at the subject (last resort)
- Set the camera to Manual mode
- Set the aperture(Av) to anywhere between f5.6 to f/8
- Set the shutter speed (Tv - time value) to 1/60s or so. You could go up higher if you are shaking quite a bit.
- Put the middle focus pointer on a part of the machine that has details and squeeze the shutter half way to focus.
- Squeeze shutter to shoot

So, I took a couple of more pictures of this mornings extraction...

29/2:

That's one nice extraction picture Juanjo!!!

3/3, new coffee (from the UK, very nice beans indeed - Limini from Limini Coffee, roasted 30 Jan), late in the extraction:


Edited: second shot of the morning:

First shots of the Sunday morning (late in the extraction, the first pics where unfocused):