Strong | Tough | Irrepressible
Resilient. I had a few ideas for this prompt, but wasn't sure how to go about achieving what I wanted, so I'll save those ideas for another shot.
Isn't it funny how one thing leads to another and another and before you know it, you're doing things you had never planned. That's what has happened with our retaining wall fix, which led to a remodel of our swimming pool and surrounds. After we removed all the old clay bricks from around the pool to put in more modern and cooler tiles, we got a digger in to level and slope the area around the pool so that we could put down a new concrete foundation.
That of course led to the discovery that the ground around the pool was nowhere near level, so we had the concrete slab and then about a 10cm rise of dirt. Yep, not going to work. So we got the digger back and he set to work levelling the ground from the gazebo to the concrete slab around the pool with an even downwards grade. Now it looks quite good and you'd never know it was any different.
But back to the prompt. Resilient. The ground had been taken down by about 10cm and by this time all the topsoil has been taken off, so it's back to basically clay. Then a layer of weed mat and then another layer of mulch. And along comes some rain and voila we have a few tufts of grass growing through. Yep, definitely resilient.
The other component of this prompt was about the blurry background technique:
Blurring the background happens with a combination of wide aperture (small f/number), distance between your subject and the background, and proximity to your subject.
I was on the ground for this shot and used my macro lens with the aperture set at f3.5. The short focal plane has blurred the foreground and the background behind the grass. It's quite easy to see just how narrow the focal plane is. There is quite a bit of distance between the grass and the back fence, but because of the aperture it's difficult to determine exactly what the background is.