One trick when you take a picture – no, make a picture – is to tell a bit of a story. One way to do that is to provide both a subject and context. And to separate them. By position, or by distance, or by size, or, as in this picture, which I took for The Oakville Beaver in April, by blurring out the background – which then becomes the context.

In fact as you see I used size as well: the ultra-wide lens (16mm) makes the distance look far away, because I am so close to the foreground object.

For a shot like this I use my 16-35mm f/2.8 lens on my Canon 1Ds MkIII camera. That great lens gives me the ability to get close, go wide, and yet to blur out backgrounds, which at wide angles is not easy unless you have that kind of wide aperture. Of course “getting close to your subject” is a way to enhance the “blurry background” effect.