with Lorelle and Brent VanFossen

The Beautification of a Danelion

dandelion with purple foreground from another flower blurred, photograph by Brent VanFossen

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 flowers on an island in the Puget Sound San Juans, experimenting with many different effects when we took this. Dandelions are everywhere in the Puget Sound area, dotting the landscape with their tight yellow heads which turn into white golf balls when they go to seed in the late summer. We challenged each other to photograph “boring” flowers in new ways and Brent came up with this winner.

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