It’s Spring, and the tulips are blooming at Araluen Botanic Park, a short distance away from Perth. The park is nestled in the eastern hills and generally seems to be cooler than the coastland at this time of year, from my limited experience of it.
Framing the subject with a distant background is generally a good recipe for nice blurring of the background. The white tulip at the left has become blown out, but the rest of the picture looks well exposed—even the usually-problematic reds.
I think the picture above lost something in the transition from reality to a two-dimensional image. Using a large-aperture lens would probably have helped add some character, but as it was, I was shooting with my Nikkor 18–70 mm lens.
These two pictures are of the same subject, just with different frame orientation—portrait above and landscape below. Usually, one or the other is clearly more pleasing to the eye, but in this case I think there’s something to be said for both of them. The first picture captures the sense of growth from the earth to the sky, while the second puts the pink tulip in stronger contrast to its neighbours—it really was a lone pink tulip amongst the white tulips around it. The pink tulips in the background were some distance away.
The careful observer will probably note that I’ve underexposed this last frame (and post-processed accordingly) to capture the white petals better, rather than letting them blow out to pure white. White flowers, white wedding dresses … any white object, really, requires a delicate hand to bring out the details in it.