Foreground blur

Blur the foreground and background for the ultimate blur sandwich!

When it comes to shooting nature, there are a number of approaches you can take. We often think about blurring the background to isolate our subject, but it can also look highly effective to blur the foreground and have your subject sat in a blur sandwich! To try this for yourself, you need to find the right subject, with distinctive background and foreground areas either side of a strong, recognisable form.

To create the green hazy effect on our image, we rested our camera on a mossy rock. With the moss simply touching the front of our lens at this distance it still had some transparency, meaning that you could see the form and structure of the fern plant in the mid-ground through the moss. It helps to open up your aperture setting to the widest it can go: f/2.8 in our case.

It’s important to be accurate with your focusing when you take a shot like this. Make sure you consider which part of the frame you want as your main focal point: if you’re a few millimetres off in a close-up like this, it will show in the shot.