In a Dark Time … The Eye Begins to See

Bob and I waited all week for a sunny day to drive up to the tulip farms in the Skagit Valley. And for once it was actually as sunny as the forecasters had predicted. I’d never visited the fields, so I was a amazed by the number of people who were out on a weekday visiting tulip fields.

I’ll have to admit that photographically I was a little overwhelmed by the fields, just as I’ve been in the past when I’ve tried to find an original way of presenting my impression of fields full of flowers.

I suppose I could have taken one of my granddaughters with me and posed her smelling the tulips, but somehow that seems more clichéd than I’d care to do. Instead, I’m left trying to make abstracts of the fields, an image that can somehow manage to capture the sheer number of flowers but also convey some sense of order, other than the very neat, mechanical rows, of course.

I’m afraid my rather mathematical mind couldn’t go much beyond variations on perspective, like this one with the vanishing point in the upper left corner:

Or this more traditional vanishing point, which leaves one wondering why it took so long historically for artists to actually incorporate perspective in their drawings:

In the end though, I really enjoyed the small plantings of various tulips at Tulip Town more than rows on rows of tulip plants, perhaps because it reminds me of the “naturalized” effect. Of course, the fact that these were called “Kees Uncle” also seemed to call to me for some reason:

I certainly saw a lot of unusual tulips, and though I’d like to have a few of them in my yard, like this one called Washington State,

overall I think I’m happier trying to get shots of the tulips in my own yard. Here, at least, I can do a better job of isolating a single plant, and, if the lighting isn’t what I want one day, I can wait awhile and re-shoot the flower later.