May 2021 - Tulip Festival

Most of my photos for May are of the birds I saw in my garden during the first lockdown in 2020. But I also spent some time indoors (the weather wasn’t quite 100% perfect) and took photos of the cut flowers that we had, that my wife bought.

The first lot were yellow tulips, and this next set were orange in different shades, but still tulips. I have really enjoyed getting some of the personalities of these flowers in their photographs; this lot were much more prone to drooping than the yellow ones, so many of my photos were of them falling over the vase they were in. Seeing them falling over the side of the vase seems a bit like looking at a collection of Bronte ladies at a Ball!

I have written before about the tulip festival at Arundel Castle in West Sussex each Spring … clearly it was cancelled last year but it seems to be running this year. But they have put a set of tulip photographs on their website for us to get a small picture of what we are missing - https://www.arundelcastle.org/event/virtual-tulip-festival/. 

This particular variety is full of petals and colour – almost flame like in their appearance. They are very beautiful and very easy to photograph. One of the great advantages of still life photography, or of photographing cut flowers is that they don’t answer back, almost always stay still and can be moved around to suit your artistic vision. It’s always worthwhile to get rid of distracting backgrounds for this type of image: in this case I had put a large piece of black card behind the vase – supported by a pile of jigsaw boxes (very sophisticated!) – and that kept the background very simple. In my opinion, a backdrop like this benefits from being white, black or grey so that the colours and shapes of the object are not lost in the colour of a different backing sheet.