Tulips

Tulipa commonly called Tulip is a genus of about 100 species of bulbous flowering plants. The native range of the species includes southern Europe, north Africa, and Asia from Anatolia and Iran in the east to northeast of China. A number of species and many hybrid cultivars are grown in gardens, used as pot plants or as fresh cut flowers.

Tulip Festivals are held in the Netherlands, Spalding (England) and in North America every May. Tulips are now also popular in Australia, and several festivals are held during September and October in the Southern hemisphere's spring. The world's largest permanent display of tulips, although open to the public only seasonally, is in Keukenhof, in the Netherlands.

The welcome of the Spring after the harsh winter weather in the United States are welcomes by the Tulip festivals & the Cherry Blossoms. They add a lot of color to the environment and that is a real welcome after the dull grey & white of the winter. These photos were taken from the Longwood gardens (arboretum) in Pennysylvania on 4th May 2008. It was a nice day out with sunshine & cool breeze.



Clicked using my Nikon D50 in the bright sunlight & image balancing done using MS Picture Manager
Content courtesy: Wikipedia

Spring Colors!

Aperture: f/7.1
Shutter: 1/200th of a sec
Manual exposure, mounted on tripod, no flash

Spring is one of those wonderful seasons with colorful flowers all around the place. It is more welcome because it comes after a long 3-5 months of hard winter days. The seasons are also very distinct at this part of the world - as we move up in the northern hemisphere.

Some of the wonderful spring colors captured on an early morning after a bout of rain; shot using my Nikon D50 mounted on a tripod.

Aperture:f/5.6
Shutter: 1/125th of a sec
Manual exposure, mounted on tripod, no flash

An early Spring evening

This is the photo of an evening during early spring in New Jersey. Early mornings & late evenings are the best time to take good photographs. The lighting can do wonders at this time.

This photo was taken during one of those evenings.
Aperture: f/22
Shutter: 1/125th of a sec
Manual exposure, no flash.

Anticipation

I recently subscribed to the Digital Photography school blog & was fascinated by the different techniques that they have shared there. They have this assignments for the week where they expose us to the different settings & methods to create wonders using your camera.

This one was taken as a black & white with an ISO setting of 1600 in the twilight to introduce a certain level of grain in the photo.

Anticipation - For a better tomorrow!

Shutter Speed: 1/10 Sec
Aperture: f/22

Artwork - Painting or Photography

I was talking to a friend of mine whom I reconnected after a very long time (thanks to Orkut & Linked In), who himself is an artist & he was commenting about my photos in this blog. While I got more than a couple of constructive feedback on how can I improvise the composition and the lighting, he asked me this question out of nowhere...

Have somebody told you that a beautiful piece of work in photography has to be on precision focus on a certain object? Why not try to explore the canvas like a painter? Why not make use of the longer exposure and lightng to your advantage to make a beautiful piece of work?

I tried this on a rainy February evening, in the twilght, with a longer exposure & a smaller F-stop, & purposely made a brush motion during the exposure. I think it came out beautiful, though it does not fit into the 4 walls of photography rules...

Exposure: 1/2 Sec
Aperture: f/25

Evening with Snow & Sleet

A lazy evening with a lot of snow turning to sleet. Taken at 8 PM on 12 Feb 2008 in Morristown using a Nkon D50 mounted on a tripod.
Exposure : 1.6 Sec
Aperture: f/5