52Frames Background Weekly Photo Challenge

I was a little confused about the subject for this week’s 52Frames photo challenge. The subject was “background.” I tried a couple of things at home and didn’t like any of it. So we finally headed in to town to see what we could find. It would be a matter of “just take photos and see if anything works.” Now is the season for tulips and they are everywhere in DC. We parked in our old Capitol Hill neighborhood and headed over to the Capitol building where there are beautiful gardens around the fountains filled with red, yellow, and orange tulips. I really like one photo of the Capitol behind the tulips, but not enough to post it. Then we walked over to the US Botanic Garden where the color scheme was shades of purple and white. Around the Bartholdi fountain were hundreds of tulips in a variety of stages. I found one with a little bug and that became the centerpiece. But it didn’t seem like it was enough since everyone can take pictures of tulips. How could I make this image more interesting? I ended up using the photo times four - layering and reducing the size one on top of the next. It still needed something. So the opacity was changed from the center image - which remained at 100% - to 75, 50, and 25% at the edge. The end result was almost three dimensional and there was no doubt what the subject was in the center of it all. I also tried this technique with a few other photos. In the end my husband still liked the Capitol and tulips more than any of the layered images. So this week I would call it more of a project than a photo. Sometimes that’s just the way it goes.