Keukenhof Garden
Hello from the Netherlands! I’m across ‘the pond’ on a quick vacation floating the canals of Holland. I had hoped that the tulip season would be delayed a week or so because the timing of this trip was late but my luck ran out and the fields of color from the blooming flowers are all past. We did find color at the Keukenhof Gardens, the largest bulb garden in the world with over 7 million tulips, daffodils and hyacinths in just over 60 acres. Even on the late side it is an amazing sight.
The gardens are very very popular- 180,000 people tried to go over Easter weekend- but if you go there as soon as the garden opens you have about 2 hours of peace before the hordes of tourists arrive. My luck did extend to the perfect weather- overcast skies and no wind- perfect for flower photography.
All of these images were shot with the Nikon 85mm tilt lens. Using this lens allowed me to shoot at f8 and get all the depth of field I needed. the explanation for why f8 gives just about unlimited depth of field is complicated. The short answer is that when a lens is tilted (it looks like the lens is bent in the middle) it allows the typical plane of focus to be changed. Rather than having the plane of focus parallel to the back of the camera, tilting the lens allows the plane of focus to be along the tops of the flowers.
The reason this is important is that i can photograph at f8 rather than f32 thus gaining four stops of shutter speed so instead of shooting at ⅛ of a second I can shoot at 1/125th of a second. That is a huge difference!
I didn’t do any macro shots or an shots that required a shallow depth of field with out of focus backgrounds. Every shot I took was with my 85mm lens at f8.
Hope you enjoy the photos. I’ll be going back in a few days to try something different. I’ll let you see how I do then.