After months of gray skies and dreary weather, the sight of daffodils and tulips popping up in gardens, fields and farms is a delight here in the Pacific Northwest. The colorful flowers are fabulous for photography, and several of the biggest bulb growers in Washington and Oregon open their fields for photographers.
Tulips start to show their color in March and the blossoming continues into May, with the big fields usually in their prime around the second and third weeks of April. To celebrate the season, the two major bulb growing areas in the northwest hold annual events, the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival in northwest Washington and the Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Click on those links for information about the festivals, field locations and updates on the bloom.
Tulip Town in the Skagit Valley is a photographer’s favorite due to both the extensive and easily accessed fields and the neighboring red barn. Nearby RoozenGaarde also has acres of tulips to wander through, as well as a landscaped garden of other northwest flowers. Washington Bulb Company, which owns RoozenGaarde, has several other fields in the Skagit Valley, some of which may be open to visitors.
In the Willamette Valley, Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm near Woodburn is Oregon’s biggest tulip grower and their fields are also open during the annual festival. In either location, I recommend that photographers get there early, before the crowds arrive and while winds are light and the angle of the sun low. You may not actually be able to get into the fields before 9 AM, but you might find some good photo angles from roadsides along the fields, and you’ll get a parking place close to the entrance and not have to drag your gear through acres of cars.
One of the things that makes photography in the tulip fields so fun is that you can use any and all of your camera equipment to get great photos. Wide-angle lenses, telephotos to zoom in on and isolate a single blossom, and macro lenses for super close-ups. I used a variety of techniques for the photos above. In the lead photo, I got down to ground level at the edge of a field and used a very wide-angle lens to look up to the flowers and clear blue sky. One advantage to this angle is that you can’t see the many other photographers and visitors that were all around this same field. For the photo with the barn, I stopped my lens aperture down to about f/16 to get enough depth of field to have everything in focus. The rows of pink tulips were taken with a telephoto zoom, also stopped down, from the roof of my truck. The close-up of the yellow flower was taken with the same tele-zoom, this time using a wide aperture at the closest focusing point and maximum zoom setting on the lens so that just one blossom was in focus and the rest were just a soft mass of color. I also composed this photo for backlighting, which often works really well with flowers, and used a collapsible reflector to bounce some light back on the shadow side of the bloom. All of these photos are processed pretty much “straight”, but you can sure have a lot of fun with digital processing for a variety of effects with these flowers. One more tip for photographing the tulips: the fields are often muddy or at least damp, so wear shoes and clothes you don’t mind getting dirty (nylon rain pants work great), and take something like a plastic trash bag to set your gear on while you work.
Have fun in the fields, and if you like these photos or find this post useful, please leave a comment, share on Facebook or send out a Tweet.
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