About This Picture

Photographed in April 2001, near Mount Vernon, Washington, with a Nikon F100 camera, a Nikon 70-300 f/4-5.6 lens, and Fuji Velvia film. The exposure was f/5.6 for 1/30th of a second.

It was a rare sunny day in the Seattle area, and an even rarer day when my dear friend (a medical school student) had a break from studies and work. We drove to the annual tulip festival in Skagit County for a day of sun and scenery.

This picture was taken in the late afternoon, with the sun starting to dip a bit in the sky, backlighting the flowers and making them glow. The wind was blowing hard, making the flowers sway wildly, and making any shots with everything focused from near to far, and everything perfectly still, an impossibility. Instead, I chose the widest aperture and fastest shutter speed possible, and strove to come up with a composition that would make best use of the consequently shallow depth of field. I chose to focus on a single flower in a field, and so I wanted to pick a flower that somehow stood apart from the rest. I found this red one in a field where all the others were yellow (yes, it was really growing there; I did not place it, and it was not photoshopped from yellow to red), and composed a picture which gave it strong emphasis, while maximizing the expression of its rarity and non-conformity. I was drawn to this flower and this composition as a graphical demonstration of Mendelian genetics, and the interplay of organismal uniformity and individuality. I like how it shows irrespressable aspects of nature, even within a man-made environment. I also enjoy its metaphorical content, even if it is not very subtle.

The window of opportunity to take a picture like this one is rather narrow. During the tulip festival, there are people walking everywhere in the fields of tulips. When the festival ends, all of the tulips are rapidly harvested, and the fields are bare within a couple hours. So, to get photos of broad expanses of tulip fields, and to get them without people in the pictures, the photography has to be done at the end of the festival, and right as the harvesting begins. In many of my tulip pictures from Mount Vernon, such as this one, there were harvesters working their way rapidly toward me, just out of view, as I captured the photo.