I find snowdrops particularly difficult, for two reasons: exposure; and composition.
It is terribly easy to over-expose snowdrops and turn the white flowers featureless. In your image for example there is nothing blown to white, as shown in the top illustration here, with Threshold set to the maximum of 255, and nothing in the image has this brightness.
Step down to 254, and just a few bright dots with brightness 254 show around the edges of the flowers. Step down one more to 253 and suddenly great swathes of the flowers are at that level of brightness, and those areas are featureless. Now look at the flowers in Dominic's top image and notice the gradations of brightness in the flowers. It's awkward to illustrate, but if you look at the Threshold images for Dominic's image you get a little more going white with each step, and it takes 30 or more steps to get to where the whole flower is white.
I find I have to underexpose a lot (according to what the camera thinks the exposure should be) to avoid making the flowers go featureless. What you get of course is a pretty dark looking photo and you have to bring up the brightness while leaving the brightest areas alone. Snowdrops are about the worse flowers I come across for this problem, but I see it with a lot of other flowers, especially if they have sunshine falling on them, not as bad as with snowdrops, but enough to be a problem all the same. I very, very often underexpose my flowers (according to the camera's view of what exposure would be appropriate), and not just by 1/3 stop or so; I take it down 2 or more stops sometimes.
And then, composition. I find it very difficult to find compositions that please my eye with snowdrops. We have several clumps of them, growing bigger every year, so every year I get a chance to have another go at them, but I've hardly ever found a composition with any of the clumps that I really like. Either I'm far enough back to see the whole clump, and I get a photo of ... a clump of snowdrops, not very interesting visually, and other stuff in the vicinity muddling up the picture. Or I move in close and try to find something that works as a composition. Dominic rightly suggested getting one or two (or three, or four...) in focus and letting the rest go out of focus, and that is the general principle I use for flowers - try to make some part(s) of the scene into a subject and try to isolate them at least a bit from the rest. The trouble I find with snowdrops (as for example with moss), is that the flowers are spread around quite close to one another and it is difficult to find a "line" to draw between what is "subject" and what is "background".
I've just found the ones below from a couple of years ago, but they are a special case that made isolating a subject easy and is not something I have encountered before or since.
First of all, a clump, not very interesting, and messy too with stuff intruding (somewhat in focus-ish) into the picture on the left, and intruding (out of focus) in front of the clump. And some of the flowers are soft; I think perhaps there was a slight breeze. That is often another problem if the light level is a bit low. Snowdrops seem to be able to move around enough to soften up with a slowish exposure while looking as if they are perfectly still. Grrrr...
0830 07 2016_02_19 IMG_4166 LR 1300h by
gardenersassistant, on Flickr
But there was an isolated flower in front of one of the clumps. And that made it possible to isolate it.
0830 08 2016_02_19 IMG_4176 LR 1300h by
gardenersassistant, on Flickr
And I tried going in closer too.
0830 09 2016_02_19 IMG_4178 LR 1300h by
gardenersassistant, on Flickr
0830 10 2016_02_19 IMG_4180 LR 1300h by
gardenersassistant, on Flickr
Actually, with better exposure, I think yours could have worked out quite well, although I would have been inclined to move the camera around to see if I could get a framing which didn't have those intrusive white areas at the top left. I tend to pay quite a lot of attention to the edges of the frame and move the camera around a lot searching for framing/composition that gives a background that fits nicely around and behind the subject. Very slight changes in angle can sometimes make a big difference, improving or ruining a composition by virtue of what is happening in the background. Sometimes I just can't get rid of all the edge issues and a bit of cloning might be needed, although of course it isn't always possible to do that in a convincing manner.
Another thing you can do is to try different apertures for a scene. These days for single (non-stacked) flower shots I generally use aperture bracketing to capture images from f/2.8 to f/22 with one press of the shutter button. Not many cameras can do this, but you can get the same effect manually, changing the aperture yourself from shot to shot. The look of the background changes from aperture to aperture, as will the amount of the subject that falls within the DoF. I can't tell beforehand what aperture might give a (to my eye) nice balance between the subject coverage and the rendition of the background. For me it is pretty much experimental every time.
Another thing you can do to get a subject in focus and the background out of focus is to use stacking, which I do quite a lot these days. It doesn't always work, and it can be quite hard work sometimes, but it is potentially another tool in the kitbag.
IMG_8758Snowdrops by davholla2002, on Flickr
