Vertical documentary street photograph of a market trader at her covered stall on a cold wet November morning, editorial photography quality, 9:16 format, photorealistic, single frame, hand-held on a full-frame camera. Nothing is posed and she is not looking for the camera: this is a woman taking twenty seconds off.

The person: a woman of about sixty, weathered northern European face, no makeup, broad cheekbones reddened by the cold, deep lines at the eyes and around the mouth, clearly visible pores and fine facial down, a few broken capillaries across the nose and cheeks, tiny beads of condensation caught in the fine hair at her temples. Grey-brown hair pushed under a dark knitted wool hat, damp strands escaped and stuck to her forehead. She looks slightly down and past the camera, mouth relaxed, eyes tired and content, no smile for the lens.

Clothing, honestly worn: a thick charcoal wool jacket, soaked dark across the shoulders where the rain has got in, the fibres matted and beaded with fine droplets, a lighter dry patch below the line of the tarp. A washed-out olive work apron over it, one strap twisted. Fingerless knitted gloves in dark red, pilled and stretched at the cuff, the exposed fingertips red and chapped, nails short and unpainted, a thin old scar across one knuckle.

The hands, the part that must be right: both hands wrapped around one plain enamel mug, exactly ten fingers, every finger correctly jointed and countable, the near hand cupping the side of the mug with the thumb laid across the front, the far hand supporting it from underneath, knuckles slightly swollen from the cold, the skin pressed and paled where it meets the hot metal. The mug is chipped white enamel with a dark blue rim, completely plain, no lettering and no pattern. Real steam rises from it in a fine irregular plume, lit from behind so that it glows, curling and breaking apart in the cold air and mixing with her visible breath.

The stall: a heavy translucent canvas tarp stretched overhead, sagging where water has pooled in it, a rope of rain running off the low corner and a steady line of fat drops falling along the front edge, each drop caught sharp and bright against the dark background. Behind her, crates of muddy root vegetables and cabbages, a set of old brass scales, a stack of paper bags, all wet and soft and far out of focus.

Light, the part that carries the picture: one bare warm incandescent bulb at about 2700 Kelvin hangs under the tarp above her and slightly to camera left, striking her face from high at an angle, modelling the near cheekbone and leaving the far eye socket in open soft shadow, laying warm amber on her skin, on the wet wool of her shoulder and through the steam. Everything behind and around her is cold blue-grey overcast dawn light at about 8000 Kelvin, three stops darker and desaturated. The two colour temperatures meet on her shoulders: warm rim light on the wet fabric at the front, cold blue reflection on the wet wool behind. The bulb itself is a small hard hot point of light hanging just above her head, well inside the frame.

Composition: her face, the steam and the mug sit in the middle of the frame, the bulb hangs directly above her head and stays well inside the middle two thirds of the vertical frame. The top of the frame holds only the dark sagging underside of the tarp, the bottom only the dark out-of-focus edge of the stall counter, both free of important detail, so the picture reads the same cropped to 9:16 and cropped to 4:5. Works in both 9:16 and 4:5 crops.

Optics: 85mm lens at f/2.0, 1/250 second, ISO 800, hand-held at her eye level, focus locked on the near eye, shallow depth of field, the market behind her dissolving into soft round bokeh, out-of-focus raindrops between camera and subject rendered as soft bright discs, natural falloff towards the corners, mild lens vignetting, a trace of chromatic aberration at the bulb.

Rendering: real skin with pores and texture, real wet wool, real enamel, real condensation, real dirt under the fingernails. Honest sensor noise in the deepest shadows, high micro-contrast, deep clean blacks, natural muted colour, editorial print quality, no HDR flattening.

No text, no letters, no numbers, no price tags, no chalk boards, no signage, no printed packaging, no typography anywhere in the frame. No logos, no brand marks, no watermark. No plastic or waxy skin, no beauty retouching, no smoothed pores, no glassy doll eyes. No extra fingers, no missing fingers, no fused or duplicated fingers, no third hand, no bent or broken wrist, no distorted hand geometry. No second person, no crowd. No smiling at the camera, no posed studio portrait lighting, no backdrop. No CGI sheen, no glow or bloom effects, no added lens flare, no oversaturated orange-and-teal grading, no fog machine haze, no cartoon or illustration style, no heavy rain streaks drawn across the whole frame.