Gold on a sea of Green - a picture from a walk I took with my daughter

A wise man once told me that the single best think you can do for your subjects is to control the background.  Ever since then, I’ve been working on controlling that background, to either offset or compliment the subject in a photo.

This is a complete lie.  The man who said that was Moose Petersen, and he was telling an entire class at last year’s photo safari at photoshop world.  And he said it approximately 15 minutes before I asked the question about snow that would haunt me for the next six months.  But I’ve already gone there.

No, he was saying that, from his perspective, the number one thing he did to improve his pictures was to make sure the background fit the image.  I’m barely understanding what he meant, but I’m starting to understand.

The photo to the right: there is a small bed of flowers up the road.  They’re fairly young right now, not fully opened.  Quite beautiful, but hard to photograph.  From above, you get flat light and not a terribly interesting image.  From the side, it’s a level sea of flowers.  From each angle, things kinda start looking… weird.

What you see here was a deliberate placement of the blurred background around the main (sharp) flower: each flower is separate, but only one stands out.  That one is taller than the rest.

A counter, example: the same flower, from a different angle:

Gold on Black, a different angle to the same flower

The top flower is the exact same one as before, only from a different angle.  The background is in shadow, whereas the light is on the flowers.  This is technically a strobist technique, but by dropping exposure by 1-2 stops, I was able to get the greens in the background down to nearly black.  A slight tweak of curves in photoshop, and it’s almost flat black.

Again, it’s about controlling the background.