Tulips and a confession

I still shoot transparencies on my SLR. Yes, I know. I might as well have just told you that I own a Betamax or an 8-track player. This is attributable mostly to money, though there are other factors. I anticipate making the leap to digital soon, but for now I use, for the purely documentary purposes of this blog, a tiny little digital point-and-shoot. So the "good" photos from my trips are often not available for several weeks after I shoot them, and in the interim I rely on my point-and-shoot to convey the general idea. It's possible to take a good photograph with it, but I would never rely on it for my "good stuff."

This weekend was the third year I've photographed the tulip fields here in Oregon. I made extensive use of this wonderful tree, shooting it from all angles, with different colors of tulips in the foreground. Here's what I was working with:











I used my long lens and homed in on the tree, an effect I obviously couldn't capture in the digital images above. The place was teeming with visitors, and I stood for thirty minutes waiting for the tree to be clear of people for one of my shots. On average, I waited about fifteen minutes for every image. But that's all right; much of photography is about waiting, and I was nearly out of my senses with pleasure at the colors and lines of this place. This is the third year I've photographed this field, and I believe it may have been the most beautiful this time:



April may be the cruelest month somewhere, but not here.