Turing the park into a studio

I love flowers.  I love taking pictures of flowers.  I always loved the pictures of flowers on a black background but couldn't figure out how to take them.  I spent $3 at the craft store and got pictures like this.

I took this outdoors in low angle sunlight.  What I added for $3 was two yards of black cloth.  I got it on sale but you can usually find black cloth in the scrap section.  Or use a piece you already have.  The cloth I got is very thin.  That doesn't matter unless the light is behind (which can be a nice effect too).  You only have to darken the background a bit to get the contrast.

  

The advantage of the thin fabric is more clear in the park.  

Heavy fabric would crush the little flowers.  With light fabric I can drape it over anything I can find behind the subject.  If I know I am shooting flowers, I put it in my camera bag.  It weighs less than a 4 pack of AA batteries and will fit just about anywhere.  I use the same fabric for shooting objects in my "studio" (kitchen).  Same theory - I drape it over a box and I have a solid black background for a lot less than a light box.

Another example:

In this one you can see a hint of the background because the direct sun hit it.  This is easy to fix in Photoshop or almost any other photo editor (levels, brightness and contrast).

 

And of course you are not just limited to black.  White, green, blue all look nice too.  Try different things and see what you get.  I just bought a yard of military camouflage ($1.97 at Beverly's - 10% Group discount) that should blur quite nicely.