Hey all,
I’ve seen this done before but don’t know how to do it myself… An overall background image, usually blurry, in a render. Its hard to explain what im talking about… If you know what I’m trying to say, could you tell me how to do it? 
hi, the easiest way, is, check on the very left hand side in your render buttons, there’s a set of three buttons, and three fields. if you click on the first button, you can browse for your background image, and just click the button right near there that says ‘bakbuf’. there are other ways of doing this too, like adding an image as a texture in the world buttons, which is slightly more complicated, and also, with the latest release, you can use nodes, but i don’t quite understand those yet, since they are new. if you’re using the backbuffer though, you’ll have to apply the blur beforehand in another app like photoshop or gimp or pixia. with nodes, i think you can apply blur to the background image from blender.
(edit) oops sorry i said right hand side, instead of left hand side, but i’ve changed it now