Paying attention to the background

My photo tour group and I visited Burano Island yesterday here during the Carnival in Venice photo workshop. Burano is famous for its colorful houses, and when costumed models are present, the photography is outstanding. In this shot, I used a 16 - 35mm wide angle lens to capture the model on the top of a bridge over the canal. The problem is that the houses that lined the canal were seemingly pushed far away by the extreme width of the lens. I wanted the colorful houses to be prominent in the background, but this didn't happen. To rectify this, I took pictures of groups of houses with a 105mm focal length and then used Photoshop to combine images. This is a three-photo composite. Backgrounds are just as important as subjects in making a picture successful, and therefore you have to pay attention to both each and every time you take a picture. If the background isn't ideal due to the limitations of optics (or any other reason), this can often be corrected in Photoshop.