Thanksgiving Point Tulip Festival 2008

Today, my friend and co-worker, Jayna Rice and I took off an hour early at work so that we could go to the annual tulip festival at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi, Utah. The festival this year began on April 11 and ends tomorrow, April 26. To show several of the pictures that I took, I created an account at PhotoBucket, then uploaded a few of my favorite pictures and turned them into the following slideshow:

Due to the unusually cold and wet spring that we have had this year, only about 40% of the tulips were in bloom, but as you can see, I still found several photo opportunities.

In taking these pictures, one of the things I tried to focus on was changing the depth of field (DOF). Depth of field means "the distance that objects are in focus." A shallow depth of field will make some objects in the picture appear to be out of focus while a large depth of field will show everything in focus. Some of the ways I changed the depth of field are:

• used the portrait and landscape automatic settings on my camera


• changed the distance from my camera to the flower by either moving in closer or by setting my camera on Macro mode


• manually changed the focal length of the lenses on my camera (18mm-55mm lens and 55mm-200mm lens)

I really found that I liked using the 55mm-200mm lens and felt that I got some great results. The following pictures show the difference between using two different focal lengths. The first picture is taken at a focal length of 66mm and the second picture is taken at a focal length of 105mm. Notice how much more the background is blurred on the picture that has a deeper focal depth.

One of the next things I want to try is to keep the focal distance the same, but manually change the aperature settings to achieve the same blurred background effect. The larger the aperature, the more blur there should be in the background.

Sunset over Willard Bay

Tonight as I left Logan (Cache Valley) to return to my home in Farmington, I came out of Sardine Canyon and noticed that the sun was just beginning its descent in the sky and would probably be setting within the next half hour. Lucky for me I had my camera with me in the car and I just couldn't resist making a quick detour to Willard Bay (one of my most favorite places) to get some pictures of the sunset. With all of the clouds in the sky, I just knew the sunset was going to be spectacular especially with the water in the foreground.

For the first three pictures, I used the landscape setting on my camera with an 18mm zoom. The last picture was on the automatic settings with a 26mm zoom. I love the reflection of the clouds in the water.