Blurry foreground/background?

I find myself compelled by a sudden onslaught of pictures I'm seeing with the subject in the foreground blurry, or the subject in the background blurry. All I know is that I want to start playing with that, but I don't know how. The little flower setting doesn't do ***, really. I just mean that the setting has focus issues if I'm shooting anything bigger than a leaf.

A little help please?

I have a Nikon D80

I don't use a Nikon, I use a canon but What i do is go on manual focus. (which is usually a little button on the side) and focus that way. Then you can either focus on the subject or the background: D Just twist the front lense til you get it right. Hope this helps.

It sounds like you have depth of field issues. You have set your aperature wrong. See the link below.

I'm not sure about your camera but the "little flower" on my camera is for "macro" shots.

Macro photography is close-up photography (see http://en.wikipedia.org/...hotography for a brief overview of macro photography).

You would never (in my opinion) use a macro shot for anything more that 1-2 feet away from the camera's lens - the focus won't work right (with auto focus). Again I'm not sure if you can "override" this by manually focusing your camera.

Its depth of field. And the should be a little switch on the lens with A and M and switch it to M and the you can sorta turn the lens to focus on wherever you want to