This is a small collection of pictures I took a number of years ago. I was flattered to have one of these images—the tulip image—featured on the cover of Black and White magazine.

These pictures were fun because I shot them all tabletop in my kitchen with a black cloth and a single piece of foam core as a reflector. And even more fun because I shot them with a Mamiya C3 camera. The C3 is an older TLR style camera that has, over the years, become one of my favorite cameras to use because of the uniquely good image quality. Not just in terms of resolution, but in terms of how it handles grays, the bokeh effect, the lens quality. The image quality of the Mamiya C3 is remarkable.

These pictures are an exploration in gray tones on black. I wanted to have a nice pop, and I wanted to be able to show the shadow areas of the leaves and the petals, and have a lot of tonal range in the grays without blowing out the highlights and without blocking up any of the blacks in the subjects themselves. Indirect light, a soft bounce, and Ilford Delta 100 film can work beautifully together.