Are you starting to see spring come alive or does Mother Nature have other plans?  In this post, I have provided 3 tips that I used to create this image.  I hope that you will find these helpful as you capture the awakening beauty of the plants and flowers in your area!

1. Isolate: Something drew your eye.  Focus in on what that is, then work the frame (often by moving your feet) until you find an angle and position that enables you to capture the image that you are envisioning.  I made my way closer to the subject, and finally decided on a position to set up for the shot.   I wanted a contrasting background so I used the brownish neutral colors to further isolate the white subject that I wanted to focus on.      
2. Get Closer:  Once you isolate the subject, keeping asking yourself what do I want to emphasize?  Is it the whole flower?  Is it the background landscape surrounding the flower?  I decided to use a zoom lens of 240 mm to get very close to the subject.  Depending on the lens aperture you might have to use a combination of your cameras zoom and your personal zoom (your feet!) to get the right depth of field to isolate the subject and blur the background.  This was shot at f/8 so the zoom was important to get the image I wanted.     
3. Selective Focus:  There are instances when you will want everything in the photograph to be very crisp and sharp.  In this particular image I did not want the entire subject in focus.  Instead, I used selective focus to allow portions of image to stand out more than others.  When you look closely at each of the small white clusters you will see that some are given more focus and others are blurred to varying degrees.