Flowers in the Netherlands in spring

Too early… the flowers were still not open yet!

This picture was shot on an early morning in 2015, in the flowerfields near Noordwijk, The Netherlands. In April of each year, all the flowers are starting to bloom in The Netherlands, and it is really beautiful to see!

That morning, my girlfriend and me took the opportunity to make some photos of those blooming fields. However… we were actually just too early! Most of the flowers were not open yet! In this picture you see some early opened narcissus and the tulips were still closed. What was stunning that morning, was the dew on the plants. Therefore, we focused on that a little bit more. My girlfriend loves macro photography and could make some real cool shots of the flowers with the raindrops on them. I on the other hand, was a bit lost… The sky was not as blue as I expected it to be and the flower fields were not yet having the colors I wanted to capture.

Nonetheless, I tried something in between macro and landscape photography; the tulip on the foreground sharp and the rest blurry, however not too blurry to lose track of where you are. As always, I had the ISO on 100 and the F-number on 7.10 (lowest of the lens is 3.5, but then you loose the background). That led me to an exposure of 1/100th of a second. Having this lens on the 10 mm setting, leads to being fairly close to the subject.
In post processing, I bumped down the highlights to reveal the details in the sky and I made the picture a little bit more vivid.

What you see on the photo is the first row of flowers; you are not allowed to stand in between the flowerbeds, due to the possible contamination. When more tourists flocked in during the morning, more and more people were standing in between the flower beds. Please don’t do that. Standing on the edge of the flowerbeds can also give you a great impulsive photo!

Camera settings:

Location