LANDSCAPES! Wednesday April 14th I awoke at 5:00am with flowers on my mind. The idea to shoot the Seattle Tulip Festival in La Conner came from my friend Dave. He proposed a sunrise shoot and I thought that would be a great idea, less people, soft morning light, and possible the opportunity to catch the sun rising up over the Cascade mountains with the Tulips in the foreground. Unfortunately, Dave a I did not connect and I dispatched alone. After driving around the Skagit Flats haphazardly for about 15 minutes I arrived at a beautiful sea of red and yellow, which were the blooming tulip fields just north of Tulip World and closest to Hwy 20. I shared the field with about 6 other photographers, I was very jealous of there gear, I must admit, but I set up my rig and started shooting away looking for whatever angles I thought were interesting. After about an hour I moved to another field of tulips, which provided some different colors, this time they were pink and purple. A layer of patchy clouds provided different contrasts of light and I hung out, shooting and enjoying the views till about 10:30am. Honestly, when I left I wasn’t sure if I had any wall worthy shoots, but once I started massaging the RAW files and bringing out the full detail I could immediately see great potential.
Gear wise I was shooting either a Tokina 12-24mm f/4 or Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 on a Nikon D300 between ISO 100 and ISO 200 with a 2 stop graduated ND filter bringing the sky and foreground exposures closer together. Post Processing was all in Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta 2 and involved curve adjustments, boosting mid-tone contrast, and selectively reducing brightness in the skies.
Here are a few of my favorites and if you would like to see all 20 from that morning click below:
Miles McKee Photography 
Amazing photograpghy as always Miles. I see a few I want to put on our walls in the future. =)