Anyone who has seen any of my close-up photos knows that I like smooth backgrounds. While it makes for very simple and accessible pictures that truly highlight the subject itself, it’s not always the desirable effect. Sometimes it’s nice to show the flower in its environment, so occasionally make some efforts to achieve this. And invariably, I fail.

When you start including the environment in the picture, it gets very complex. Finding the compromise of showing a little but not too much as to distract has proven to be a monumentally difficult task for me. Take the wood sorrel I tried to shoot last night. They were growing among grasses so I wanted to leave some of the grass in the picture, a bit fuzzy but still recognisable. But the grasses were all over the place… so I took a frame, reviewed it on the LCD, decided that one blade of grass was going distractingly in the wrong direction and removed it. Take a new frame, decide that one straw is showing too strongly. Remove. Click. Remove. Click. Remove. In the end I had the wood sorrel and a smooth background where you could just see a hint of a grass blade. And this is how it always goes for me. I start with good intentions but end up with the same type of picture I always take, simple and accessible.

The picture you see here is somewhere in the middle of the process. I’ve already removed quite a lot of the grass and I’ve also stepped up to f3.5 (started with f5.6 for more DOF) but you still see some pattern in the grass. I don’t like those light reflections on the right, so of course I removed the grasses for the next frame. And then removed more… and more…