18. Going outside my comfort zone on Tulip Day in San Francisco

People and events and flowers, oh my!

Flower Bulb Day in San Francisco

This weekend there was a delightful annual spring event in San Francisco: Flower Bulb Day where they give away 80,000 tulips in Union Square—the city’s main shopping district.¹

Last year my son and I showed up to take pictures of people with their bouquets—and unsuccessfully tried to get into the main flower giveaway area to take pictures.

This year we reached out to the organizers ahead of time and got the OK to go in with the press and influencers an hour early.

This was not my usual subject—urban architecture and details shot slowly and carefully. Instead, this involved nature and flowers... there would be lots of people... and if I wanted shots without people I’d have to work quickly to find the moments or the angles that cut them out.

My challenge: Could I get any shots I actually liked? And could my personal creativity come through or would I be shooting the same thing as everyone else?

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Geometric Nature

I liked this series of the tulips from above—and it fits into some of the other nature shots I have taken over the years that I call geometric nature (future post).

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Color as a Theme

The next thing I noticed was many of the influencers, organizers, and VIPs were wearing bright colors that matched the flowers—and the orange staff windbreakers added to that. I quickly found a few scenes where I could pair the outfits to the flowers.

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Portraits with Flowers

I noticed that I could see bunches of flowers hiding people’s faces and wondered if that would make an interesting series. But, while shooting those some folks noticed me and posed so I ended up getting some portraits of people with their bouquets (each person could take 8 tulips—with bulbs attached).

I think these shots are OK but I just don’t ever know what to do with portraits of strangers. I feel like I need a bigger project to fit them into (or these people’s contact info to share them) otherwise they bounce around aimlessly and disconnected in my collections.

I loved the red flowers matching the red sensory headphones

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Flowers without Faces

Here are my Flowers without Faces series. The colors are nice and it was a good learning experience but I don’t find these particularly successful. Next time I will have to work harder to ensure that the background behind the people and flowers is less busy—maybe a longer lens to blur the background more (these were 35 & 50 mm FFE²

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Fields of Flowers

The colors here are wonderful (thanks to the slightly overcast day and the ‘auto’ button in Lightroom) but I find them absolutely unremarkable. And I’ve got a big folder full of variations just as unremarkable. I tried getting higher, lower, different apertures, etc. but nothing made for wonderful dramatic pictures (but it is why I then moved onto the shots from above at the beginning of the post, so it led to something).

If you have any advice or suggestions on what I should try next time, please let me know.

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How about my challenge?

I think I did ok. I liked the series of tulips from above and found some creativity in shooting people matching the flowers. I also took about some good learnings for shooting people in the future.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and advice.

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Back Home

Even though we were there as photographers the organizers were kind enough to let us take our eight flowers each and back at home Sharon did her usual magic and created a stunning display. Which is my reminder to you to go find some flowers to brighten up your home this week (or as spring comes to your area). We are beyond 1634 so tulips are once again affordable.

Happy Spring!

Warmly,
josh

1. A few weeks ago Macy’s announced that it would be closing its Union Square store—one of the biggest stores in the area. San Francisco has also gotten a lot of bad press recently so this event was a moment for the city to show off the vibrancy of Union Square and of San Francisco. They did a great job. It was active and energetic and filled with kids and families.

If you’d like to know more about the state of San Francisco, check out the

Jefferson Graham

video on the subject.

2. FFE = Full-Frame Focal Length Equivalency. e.g. a 35mm lens on my camera is similar to a 50mm lens on a traditional 35mm film camera (or a full-frame digital camera).