Green Tea Magic - Still Life Study

We have been having fun with still life shots. What does it takes to make a great still life photo?
Currently we are working with some of the ELEMENTS from the last post.

ELEMENTS

Subject or subjects
The background
Shadow
Light - the overall amount of light, the color of light and what is lit or not
Composition
Angle
What is in or out of focus

"Keep in mind what ELEMENTS we have to work with and explore adding new elements."

Since the theme is "Some Of Our Favorites" we chose organic Green Tea (from the REAL FOODS COOP in Florence), beeswax candles and old glass including a Flameware tea pot for our subjects. The shot is a well lit "product photography" style image, arranged upon a wooden cart near a window for natural light. We again used this as a starting point.

Still Life It is about inanimate objects...

The idea is to try out each of the different ELEMENTS listed above and add some new elements. So for example, after studying the image above for a while we wondered about how orderly or hand place the subjects should be. Should they look evenly spaced with every item visible, or is it just too staged looking? We should try out some of the ELEMENTS we have to work with listed above. We also added a few new ELEMENTS to make the shoot more interesting and fun.

For subjects we added a bamboo cutting board and a hardwood holder. The camera was moved closer to some of the subjects so there was less white background and more color. If you click each image, you can see a hi-res version to get a better idea. We also overlapped some of the subjects. Note the Barrel Distortion from being so close.

New ELEMENTS

Placement - staged or not staged
Evenly spaced, random or overlapping
Barrel Distortion
Contrast
Color vs black and white (grayscale)
Being close or more distant

Backing up removed some of the Barrel Distortion in the shot below. But does that make the shot better? Below that we randomized the placement of subjects to see what that might be like.