The end of April was the last weekend for the tulip festival in Washington's Skagit Valley. Iris Arts was there—not only to enjoy the tulips and remaining daffodils, but to make new photographs. After all, who doesn't like to look at flowers?
A deceptively simple photograph of flowers at the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. More often than not—in life and photography—considerable thought and effort are required to create the illusion of simplicity. Click on the photograph to go to its location on the Iris Arts website. Photo: © Nancy Rommes
The flat Skagit Valley is born of geologic tumult
Near the coast, the flat Skagit Valley is defined by the meandering.river and neighboring level farm fields. From the now-peaceful flower fields. the visible peaks of both the Olympic and the Cascade mountain ranges hint at a tumultuous geologic past.
In fact, volcanism and glaciation dominated the geologic story here. Pyroclastic mud flows and sea level changes altered the courses of ancient rivers and deposited enormous amounts of sediment in the region. This unusually flat and fertile valley is the placid legacy of a raucous geologic history.
RoozenGaarde—home to the tulip festival
RoozenGaarde farm grows flowers in the Skagit Valley and is home to the annual tulip festival. Vast fields of tulips and daffodils are separately cultivated in rows of seemingly endless color. Not far away, show gardens display tulips of differing colors and shapes. Many tulips are themselves multi-colored.
The arrangements in the flower beds are determined by the gardeners, but the composition of the photographs is our choice.
The photograph above was one of many hundreds taken by Nancy. This seemingly simple composition was actually much more technically challenging than it looks. The day was sunny, so to achieve a soft, uniform lighting, she either waited for a cloud to pass in front of the sun, or found a composition in the shade.
The challenge of getting a still photograph of dancing tulips
There was a slight breeze that caused the flowers to bounce and sway, making it difficult to achieve sharp focus. Nancy chose a higher ISO to permit a faster shutter speed that might freeze motion, but the faster shutter speed demanded a wider lens aperture to get the correct exposure. A wider aperture meant a shallow depth of field.
In other words, it was not possible to stop the flower motion while keeping everything in focus. The solution was to compose the photo with the camera on a tripod and, without moving the camera, make several exposures, focusing a little further into the scene with each exposure. Nancy usually made 3-4 exposures of each composition.
"Blending" several exposures in the computer to get one sharp one
Back home on the computer, Nancy would take one such series of images, figuratively "stack" them on top of each other in Photoshop®, align them, and mask out the unsharp flowers while revealing the sharp ones. Finally, she would "flatten" the modified stack of exposures to make the final photo. It's an exacting and time consuming process—especially when the process cannot be automated due to the irregular movement in the scene.
It's often complicated to make a simple photograph
If the final result looks seamless and effortless—well, that's how it is supposed to look. We'd like everyone to enjoy the flowers without thinking about how hard it is to make the photograph. On the other hand, we'd like you to know that these seemingly simple photographs do require some work and expertise.
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