Brian Moore

Moderator
They seem to me to have a martial bearing, at least to me. Hence the title. Tulips are a big thing in the Skagit Valley of Washington State (which is where I took this picture) and they're in full bloom this time of year.

I used this one yesterday as my 59th weekly print for Ukraine.

Sigma Quattro SD with Sigma 30/1.4.


 
Great image.
The lower part of the petals - I love the way the treatment has rendered what is such a beautifully pure thing as a tulip to be just a little grubby looking!
 
I live in Holland, Michigan, which has an annual touristy Tulip Time festival. It is sometimes something to be avoided by locals due to increase in vehicle and foot traffic.

The city plants well over a million bulbs a year, which are cold-stored at a range of temperatures and planted on a staggered schedule so they bloom on a staggered schedule...Michigan weather being as unpredictable as it is. Some years it's 80F/27C and other years there is snow. Tourists are disappointed if there is a 'stem fest' due to the bulbs all blooming and dying before the festival starts or haven't opened at all due to lingering snow.

It seems wasteful to dig up the bulbs and dump them in a city tulip graveyard for the community to take home for their own use, but if the bulbs are left in the ground they will do whatever nature allows them to do on their own schedule.

There are posters created by local artists, but the organization has always been uptight and conservative photography...obsessed with realism and hyper-realism in paintings. There were a few that were less real and more graphic-arts-like. Color photography never got accepted by the poster committee, which was also strange...that met the realism goal...

I began to look at the hyper-real closeup renderings as surreal, because some of the tulip renderings were many times larger than reality. I imagined them to be 4-5 m tall, a danger to human passersby, if a stem were to break. It they had a perfume it would be overpowering as one flew among them on the back of a 1 m bumblebee.

I do not need to see another painting of yellow tulips with an insect on one of them.

I prefer to see them in stages of decay, defocus, backlighting, etc. I mean them no harm, but am bored with the traditional presentation.

So this photo offers an alternative interpretation. Thank you.
 
"Smokestack Tulips" would have been a good title. Wish I'd thought of it. You have a vivid imagination. A 1m Bumblebee sounds like a creature I'd not want to come across. :D

Thanks for your comments, Murray. I had no idea about the staggered schedules. I'm not sure they do that in the Skagit Valley of Washington, which is where I took this picture. (Their display season, which draws thousands of visitors, is very short and runs pretty much the month of March and partly into April. This year was a particularly good year so the display season was extended a couple of weeks.) I'm not a big fan of flower pictures so when we attended last year's Tulip Festival I soon tired of conventional images and began looking for different ways to portray the flowers. This was one. Thanks again, Murray.
 
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