This is a kind of photo I need to go back to—I was practicing lighting and I was trying to shoot interesting objects.
It happened to be a week right around this time of year when the snowdrops were suddenly in bloom. I had this dark cup and inspiration hit me. I was really happy with the result except for the one flower up above the plane of the cup being out of focus—I should have either had it flat on the top of the other flowers or taken two shots and combined them.
I’ve been realizing too that one thing I’m missing now is a completely dark space. We had a finished basement in our old house where I could pretty well plunge the room into complete darkness. Here we have a basement that’s not quite as dark and it’s also not finished so it’s not much fun to hang out in it for great lengths of time. When you control the light 100% with flash or otherwise, the outcomes feel much more a result of something you did on purpose rather than you adapting to a changing light condition that you can at best fiddle with. There are exceptions: I do like shooting people and objects that are right next to a window in an otherwise dark or unlit room—the natural light in that case is pretty steady for long periods of time if it’s a sunny day or even if it’s uniformly overcast.