Winter can be a cozy season of hot cocoa, silly sweaters, and marshmallows.
Or it can be a cold and severe time of minimalist Nordic interiors, pale colors and snow-white decorations.

Whatever you work on, including hands in frame brings your image to life.
Are you creating a food photo? Capture hands serving food or adjusting napkins.
Or maybe you're trying to capture someone's workplace? Perfect! Let the hands of an artist, carpenter, tailor or barista be your star!

It doesn't even need to be a rare trade.
Hobbies have a huge number of narrative opportunities!

I'm not saying you need to convert to photojournalism, of course!
Stage your composition in advance and bring your own hands into the picture.

But it's just such a perfect model for a cool flat lay! There's no end for ways you can use coffee as a prime hero of your flat lay. Let's look at a couple of them.

First of all, coffee can bring you everywhere. A botanist can have a cup of coffee and you can shoot it surrounded with Petri dishes and strange plants. An artist can drink coffee for inspiration and you'll get a chance to shoot swathes and pallets in colors of latte and espresso.

Second, if you don't want to imagine a character, use a coffee cup not like a real object, but like a flat circle. That will help you to create a metaphor.

Say, that can be represented by a circle? A balloon? Ok, then shoot a set of coffee cups as a bunch of party balloons. A planet? Create your own Solar system with coffee cup planets, cookie asteroids and a cake Sun. Brainstorm this notion for at least 15 minutes and you'll be surprised how easy it is to come up with stories for your next shooting.

Say, we can draw swirls, circles, and vignettes with honey, thick syrups and sauces. Here's a simple trick. If you can't make honey to hold its form, make a paper template, cover it with honey and use in your composition.

In this example, I cut out a couple of swirls from paper. I took a white background (so the paper won't be noticeable) and glued the templates to it with a simple glue stick. After that, I covered templates with honey and took a shot.
Surface tension is a marvelous thing!

This trick works with practically any thick liquid like ketchup or jam. But if you're not in a crafty mood, try something even simpler.

Use a small syringe to create drops and put them in beautiful little curves.
Or arrange berries or coffee beans in tiny curls and waves. It doesn't take much time, but looks pretty cute!

The alchemy of baking is perfect for a flat lay photography! Food looks gorgeous from above, but for pies, it's twice true. And there are so many stories you can tell with dough and flour!

Milky Way always comes to my mind when I look at scattered flour. Look, there's an entire galaxy!

Include silhouettes of stars and starships in a typical baking flat lay. Make a couple of paper templates and put them in your composition. Scatter flour on your templates and remove them with tweezers, leaving dark silhouettes.

It doesn't have to be a collection of stars and spaceships. Or flour, for that matter. Try this trick with spices or cocoa.

Decorated crust

Another way to make your baking flat lay interesting is to experiment with a crust of your pie. Bakers do all sorts of incredible things!

Tiny flowers, leaves, stars, birds, fantastically complicated abstract ornaments!
I'm practically hopeless at baking, but I bet even I can arm myself with cookie cutters and try something like that.