I went to the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival this last weekend for the first time. It was pretty tough to get any decent photos with the thousands of other people there trying to do the same thing but I got a few that I like.

These are all straight out of the camera with no post processing except for a little cropping. They are mainly shot with Pentax-F 50mm 1.7 and a Pentax-K 35mm 3.5 lenses. Both lenses were shot with wide open apertures for shallow DOF.

Thoughts, critiquing, and opinions welcome and appreciated. Thanks!

[drifter]

Lovely colors on all and I like the composition of #5, 7, 8, 9, & 10. Nice to see some imaginative flower shots!

[JP_Seattle]

Thanks drifter. I really like #5. It looks great blown up on my 37" monitor!

[coachteeter]

Very well done! I know how hard it can be to get good shots of those tulips!

I like 5 & 10 the best by far.

[JP_Seattle]

Staring at #10 you can almost see the tulips swaying back and forth in the breeze. Trippy!

[coachteeter]

You're right! That is kinda trippy!!!

You can see the tulips swaying in this shot I took too.

[YT]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-yCo_wKm7k[/YT]

Ok.....so I shot it in video, so it's a little easier to get the motion of the tulips!

[newmikey]

Again, it's such a pity we don't see that over here. The best I can do is:



[EDIT] Forgot to post EXIF and Flickr strips it so:

Exposure: 0.008 sec (1/125)
Aperture: f/16.0
Focal Length: 103 mm
Focal Length: 103.0 mm
ISO Speed: 100
Exposure Bias: 0 EV
Flash: Off, Did not fire
Compression: Pentax PEF Compressed
Software: K20D Ver 1.03
Date and Time (Modified): 2010:04:18 16:18:10
Exposure Program: Aperture-priority AE
Metering Mode: Center-weighted average
User Comment: Autoconversion script rev. 2009-06-26 (Developed with DCRAW, ImageMagick and GMIC - OpenSource and free software)

[rparmar]

Good Lord! That is tulipomania for sure!

For those who don't know, tulipomania was a real thing, a fanatical devotion to the flower that led to a rapid rise in prices and a kind of "tulip price bubble" that exploded in the seventeenth century. Somewhere I have this book, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" which covers this and other similar phenomena. It was written in 1850 or something but reproductions have been kept in print, since it is such a fascinating examination of bizarre human behaviour.

[Spideralex90]

The third shot and the last shot stand out most to me, but i like the all of these pictures. The third is probably my favorite because the flower edges look sharp and make something normally thought of as lovely almost dangerous looking. Good stuff.

[JP_Seattle]

You are absolutely correct. I watched a whole TV show about this. When the tulips first made their way to Holland from traders from the east, they were very highly regarded and certain varieties would even cost as much as a house in those days. Crazy to think about!

Also there are many rumors about how Tulips got their name but the correct story is that the traders that brought them to Europe wore a single Tulip in their hat (turban) and when asked what the flower was called, a trader thought he was talking about the hat and said, "Toliban"... which was how they pronounced turban back then. It was adapted by word of mouth to the word tulip.

Good Lord! That is tulipomania for sure!

For those who don't know, tulipomania was a real thing, a fanatical devotion to the flower that led to a rapid rise in prices and a kind of "tulip price bubble" that exploded in the seventeenth century. Somewhere I have this book, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" which covers this and other similar phenomena. It was written in 1850 or something but reproductions have been kept in print, since it is such a fascinating examination of bizarre human behaviour.