The broth was the reddest thing in the stall, and the light was doing its best to kill it.

It was past eleven at ONE.85 Big Prawn Mee, and I had been standing at the counter for a while, camera down, watching the uncle work the pot. He lowered a metal basket of noodles into the boiling water, shook it twice, then reached for the prawns with a pair of long chopsticks. Behind him, the broth simmered dark and orange, that deep color that comes from hours of prawn shells breaking down into something you cannot rush.

I lifted the camera and the color drained out of everything.

That was the trouble all night. The fluorescent tubes overhead. They flattened the broth into a thin, washed pink, took the fire out of the shells, turned a bowl that should have glowed into something pale and tired on the screen. The richest thing in the room, and the light refused to let me have it. I experienced a similar lighting situation while I was at Xing Ji Wanton Mee.

So I moved.

You learn to work around a stall light rather than under it. I stepped to the side, away from the tube, and let the broth catch the warmer spill from the lamp near the pot instead. I pulled the exposure down. Better to let the background fall dark than let the fluorescent wash sit on the surface. Better to lose the counter behind it than lose the red.

The uncle ladled the broth over the noodles and the bowl began to fill.

Thick soup, dark at the base where the shells had given everything they had. The prawns came next, split down the back, laid across the top with their shells still catching a faint shine. A scatter of fried shallot. A few strands of kangkong. Then he pushed the bowl toward the counter and the steam lifted clean off it, and for a moment, out from under the tube, the broth found its color again.

That was the frame. Low, close to the rim, the prawn in the foreground and the broth running dark behind it. I turned slightly so the warmer light raked across the surface instead of flattening it, and the red came back, deep and honest, the shells catching a soft glint along their ridges.

One frame. Then the steam thinned, and the tube reclaimed the bowl.

The stall never slowed. A handful of people sat scattered across the tables, supper folk, the quiet kind who come after the crowds have gone. The knock of the ladle against the pot. The hiss of the noodle basket. The whole corner smelled of prawn shells and pork stock and something toasted underneath it all.

I ate after that. You do not let big prawn mee go cold for a photograph.

The broth came deep and sweet, the prawns firm, the noodles heavy with the soup they had soaked up. It tasted like patience, like the hours it takes to pull that much flavor out of a shell. The kind of bowl that asks nothing except that you sit down and finish it.

Later, going through the frames, I kept returning to the one I nearly threw away.

Not the tidy bowl. The one from mid-pour, the uncle’s hand blurred above the pot, the broth catching that warmer light off to the side, the prawn barely in focus. Half the frame had gone dark where I let the fluorescent wash fall away.

But the red was there. Real, deep, the color the light had tried to take all night.

That is what the pot taught me. The broth was never dull. The light was just standing in the way, and the work was learning where not to point the camera.

The steam lifts. The next bowl goes out. The uncle stirs the pot again, and the red holds a little longer than the light wants it to.