with Lorelle and Brent VanFossen

Tag Archives: backgrounds

Flash Isolates Natural Subject

This dried thistle head in the Painted Hills of Oregon caught my attention with its textures and lines. I’ve always loved thistles, alive and vital with their fluffy tops, and dried out cone-like structures of mystery and pattern. To isolate this thistle, I used flash to force the background to go to black. The flash […]

The Beautification of a Danelion

In our series on Background Magic, we talk about how to do this, to blur the foreground of your subject by holding a leaf or flower petal in front of it, close to the camera lens. It becomes a blur, almost a transparent wash of color around the subject. Brent and I were photographing wild […]

Background Magic Part Two

Specific Crimes of Ignoring the Background In part one of Background Magic, we looked at what makes a perfect background and what questions to ask yourself as you compose a photograph, and some of the typical techniques used to change, clean, or manipulate the background to improve it. In this section, we cover the specific […]

Background Magic

We are often so caught up in the excitement of photographing the subject, we often forget the single most important element that can make or break our photograph: the background. The background, and in its own way the foreground, can accentuate or completely distract from your subject. How many times have you gotten back vacation […]