Unfortunately, my first photographic results were far from magnificnt.  So much attention was focused on the beauty of the flower, that I neglected to pay sufficient attention to the background.  Most of my focusing gets done at the lens’ full aperture of f/2.8 which, on a 100mm lens, is sufficient to make the background blur into featureless anonymity.  However, exposing at f/22 (to provide sufficient depth-of-field to get a majority of the front-to-back range of the flower in focus) proved painfully revealing of plaster, bricks, and window wells from the side of the house.  I have a depth-of-field preview on my camera; I should have used it.

 

Fortunately, I still had blooms near their peak after I had learned of my mistake.  I went back and tried to position the camera in such a way as to avoid the distracting features in the background.  I spent nearly an hour in the futile attempt to find the ideal camera orientation before I was struck with a solution.  I had plenty of small scraps of mat board (in various colors) from matting and framing projects over the years.  It took almost no time to find a piece of sufficient size and complimentary color which I could put behind the flower to essentially block the distracting features of the background.  Rocks (a.k.a. “Highland Potatoes”) are plentiful in my yard, so I used a couple to easily hold the mat board in place.  Having relieved the constraint of the background, I was free to orient the camera to make best use of the direction of the morning sunlight and the most photogenic pose of the flower.

 

Mat board scraps are easily (and inexpensively) obtained from a framing shop.  Pick up a good assortment of colors so that you can complement the colors of the flowers you will capture.  Make sure to keep the mat boards far enough behind the flowers so that the texture (or flaws) in the mat boards won’t be in focus when you photograph at f/22.