Skills in Retrograde

Photography-wise, I feel I'm going backwards. I haven't shot a lot on the last few months, maybe I'm just rusty.
I've been playing chess lately (on-line at chess.com) so I thought I would break out the board and take a snap.
Now, the set has been out on my coffee table. I had it up to follow along with a match the first game I had on-line with a stranger. Of course, we make the first few moves in the Ruy Lopez and the dude goes on vacation. So I move the board into the kitchen and set up lights.
Here, I wanted to restrict the light to the board and blow the rest of the room to black. In my first quick shots i could see that the dark pieces were going tb troublesome as they suck up light. My basic setup was a flash with a RayFlash adaptor on a stand over the board. That was my main light. I wanted to see what the rayflash would do to the shiny, angular objects. On the side camera right I set another flash a few stops under to try and fill in the black pieces. Then I added some on-axis at lowest power to try and even out the shadows.
The first few shots I kept getting this big, specular ring over on the black king-side rook. I couldn't figure out what was causing it. Reflection from a nearby beer can? Open screen door bounce? I tried different things and different light levels until I realized it was the bounce angle from the main light. Moving the camera a little sort-of solved it. I thought about using the umbrella instead, but that was too big I thought.

Overall, I didn't get the light I really wanted, I kind of settled for a best-guess solution. Which, when I think about it, is a lot like my chess game. Good itentions to improve, but inclined to guess when presented with real problems. My chess game is moving backwards, too.
Ugh

Posted from my iPhone