Ottawa Tulip Festival - 2018

[Manfred M]

I wandered around the Dow's Lake part of Ottawa for an hour or so late this afternoon. It was the second last day of this year's Ottawa Tulip Festival. Some 1 000 000 tulip bulbs have been planted and the festival has been running since last weekend.

It's a beautiful site, but with tens of thousands of visitors on a sunny Sunday afternoon, photography is challenging at best with so many people standing shoulder-to shoulder. Here are some shots of some of the tulip beds.

All the shots were hand-held (not a hope of using a tripod) and I use a polarizing filter to cut the glare.


1.





2.





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4. If you look at the top edge of this image, you will get an idea of how crowded the place gets when tens of thousands of visitors descend on the tulip displays.

[NorthernFocus]

I really like the bands of color in the first one, Manfred. Holy cow that's a lot of people. That makes shooting pretty tough. Having shot the tulips in Washington state several times I can appreciate how challenging it can be. Seems simple. There's a million tulips, just go take a few shots.... Until you try it

[tbob]

I am with Dan on this. How on earth do you find a spot to shoot? For the low angle shot, is it a matter of waiting until a spot vacates? I shot some interior scenes at the Forbidden City in Beijing, probably took five minutes to shuffle to the doorway then I only had ten to fifteen seconds before the crowd pressure forced me to move on. i suspect similar.

[Manfred M]

Thanks Dan and Trevor. As you can probably guess it was a lot of waiting for an opening, dashing in and taking the best shot I could. I had hoped to get down early in the morning, but we had company for the weekend so the driveway was completely blocked with cars.

The tulips were just past their prime, so the hot and sunny day we had today would have been really tough on them. I'm going to see if I can get some shots tomorrow, but I suspect I'm stuck waiting for next year.