yellow flower

seriously. not since i having had the occasion to photograph the blue flower (which c.z. tells me is not its proper name) have i been so crazy about photographing a particular kind of flower. and i'd insist again that i'm not even really a flower person.

but i am (or i at least i really want to be) an "aperture and specular highlights" kind of person. i was reading a couple nights ago about specular highlights and while i kinda sorta understood what they were, i couldn't recall having had them (or many of them) in the photos i had taken. according to my book, "the distance between the the main subject and background lights will determine how large the specular highlights (out-of-focus circles/spots or hexagons of color) will be."

the fun and puzzling part of photography for me, at least at this point, has to do with trying to reverse engineer the photos i've taken, to understand why they look the way they do in hopes of being more in control of what i do, how the shots look. i understand now, i think, why the fourth photo looks the way it does but i'm less sure why and how the first, second and sixth photos work. why, in other words, they look like they were shot in a studio situation, say, against a black background. clearly, light/lighting has a lot to do with what's happening in both kinds of shots, but i'm still not at the point of understanding how, if i want a black background or an entirely white one, what i need to do, what settings to choose, where the light needs to be in relation to the subject, etc.