Oh yeah, light

tulip_town-41
Originally uploaded by punkd0rk

So yesterday my wife and I headed up to Skagit Valley for the annual tulip festival. First thing I have to say is I hate Everett. We got stuck in stop and go traffic no less than three times. This is about noon on a weekend day. This makes a 90 minute trip approach two hours. We then get stuck in traffic just getting off the freeway in Mount Vernon. Okay, so that is to be expected, small town, big event and all. We stop, grab lunch and then on to the tulips!!

We went to Tulip Town. There are several gardens in the area and most of them charge a small admission fee. Tulip Town was great, $5, cash only. Oh, no cash? One of you can go in and use our ATM, enjoy the $3.50 service charge!!

So we make it in and it is just crowded, as heck. It feels like high school again with large groups of people just standing in the middle of walkways talking to each other. We push through and make it out to the tulips. What then happened was a huge surprise. There were a ton of beautiful tulips, but the overall planted area seemed rather small. I would estimate an acre perhaps. And the people! My god, they were everywhere, standing in the tulips as the signs clearly said not to. Picking tulips as the signs clearly said not to. Getting in each others way and in general just milling about like a herd of cattle.

Thus began my problem. I was there to take pictures of flowers, not people. I spent the next hour or two carefully trying to compose my shots to keep people out of the majority, while not taking so long as to drive my wife nuts (she was carrying the baby afterall). What seemed like a small amount of flowers ended up taking quite a while to go through so in the end, it wasn't a bad place. Next year however, we'll go during a weekeday.

Now, back to light. I get home and download the ~150 pictures from my camera and start processing them (I shoot only in raw now for the added tweaking ability). I notice that I had some interesting light in a lot of the pictures. Not interesting good, or interesting bad, just a little different. Perhaps not the most flattering light. I realized I got so overwhelmed by the crowds and composition and keeping people out of my pictures that I totally ignored what the light was actually doing. It's rather easy to lose focus in this setting, the flowers are amazing and ever shot looks good, I mean, it's filled with flowers! To really take it above and beyond though I wish I would've paid a bit more attention to my lighting and shooting angles, I could've had a lot better results.