It’s the 9th of april 2015, although its springtime the weather is colder than usual. Ever since my first try  I’ve been hunting for that one image of the tulip fields that I will be completely happy with. So I set out to give it another try. I know it’s early in the season but I’ve been late too many times before. Better be early and have an opportunity to go again in the near future than wait too long I thought. The weather was being great all week every night with a spectaculair sunset and clouds in the sky!!! That gave me the final push, knowing that tonight this would be my one chance for a week I decided to go and take a shot at it again.

I arrived about a half an hour before sunset, a little late so I had to work fast. I had found a new location and after parking my car and walking up to the gate of the field I felt hesitation. I stood there on this rural country road with in the background the village of Lisse and hesitated to walk into the field. I looked around, a lady on an evening stroll passed by, a German car cruised by on a slow pace enjoying the couple of fields that were already blooming. All was quiet. I looked up to the sky and it was not looking promising, a slight haze was in the air and there were no significant clouds to be found. I walked into the field, the tulips were in bloom bit not yet very tall. I chose a couple of rows that were blooming the most and started shooting away.

As I mentioned all was quiet, some ducks nearby were quacking and a Lapwing couple was making some noise in the distance. Then suddenly there was this sound right next to me. It sounded like hard plastic moving over each other. It lasted only a second and when I turned around there was nothing there. Awakened out of my photo frenzy I started to pay attention to the sounds around me. And there it was again coming from a different direction. It was all around me, irregular small and delicate sounds of plastic shells moving over each other. Then I realized where the sounds were coming from; it were the leaves of the Tulips! My guess is that during daytime the temperature is warm and the leaves expand. So in the evening when the sun sets the temperature goes down and the leaves tend to shrink a little, when they do this the leaves will not shrink in the same tempo so they’ll rub over each other every now and then. With this mystery solved I went back to shooting and composing again. But I enjoyed the sounds around me a lot more.

I experimented a little with a shallower depth of field and I love how some of those images came out! Maybe I’ll go out there soon… Even though I’m quite happy with the results I still feel that that ‘one’ image is still missing…