Immediately following the war, Steichen began works to ultimately master the technical aspects of photography itself, namely, lights and darks themselves. In one exercise of this, Steichen took over 1,000 exposures of a single white teacup and saucer against a graduated scale of tones from pure white to black velvet. While this redundancy may seem obscure, in A life in Photography, Steichen stated that "the experiment was to a photographer what finger exercises were to a pianist."