Happy Sunday! This week, Ritva – the host of Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #304 – challenges and inspires me to pay attention to the backgrounds of photos instead of the foreground. I hope you like my collection of photos.

It’s hard to believe this was over a year ago when I visited the UK. Time flies, doesn’t it?

For the first photo, I was inspired by Ritva’s photo of the three guys with their backs to the camera. That was in the British Museum, which I must say has to be the most crowded museum I’ve ever been to. There were people everywhere, which I guess make it perfect for this challenge. I was actually trying to photograph the exhibit but these people wouldn’t leave. Oh well.

The second photo takes us to Greenwich – about a 20-minute boat ride from the Westminster Pier. I love alleys like this. This kind of place reminds me either of horror movies or rom-com – depending on the background and I think the heart means rom-com.

Photo number 3 transports us to Edinburgh. I tried to remove the people in the photo with no luck, perhaps I should try it with AI. Anyway, this photo is about the castle in the background, not the man in the foreground.

While I feel it’s important to have a subject in photos, I feel sometimes, the subject is the background of the photo. Like that of abstract and fill the frame photos, the background is the entire photo. The photo of the blue flowers is now serving as my background on my laptop and the more I look at it, the more I like it.

Lastly, as much as I love to put every one of my flower close-up against a black background, I do believe that a good background can help tell a story of where the photo was taken even though sometimes, you can’t really tell what the background represents, like that of Mt. Fuji behind those flailing cosmos or a merry-go-around behind those yellow tulips.