Tulip Watch 2022

Going back to before I moved from Ann Arbor for a quick look at how the tulips fared this year. As I’ve mentioned before, someone who had the apartment before me planted tulips at some point. Without me doing anything at all, they keep coming back each year, and may possibly be spreading, or it could just have been a good year for them this year. Sometimes they get eaten by deer before having a chance to bloom, or last year they were unceremoniously mowed down shortly after blooming (I rescued the less mangled flowers, stuck them in a jam jar, and brought them into the apartment), but this year I had just under two dozen tulips bloom.

I took my telephoto lens out for a spin on a few separate evenings to take advantage of the shallow depth of field on the lens and the softer light of the declining sun. Without getting into an optics discussion, given a particular focal distance, a lens with a longer focal length has a shallower depth of field. For example, if you’re taking a photo of a flower two meters away with a Canon Rebel T6, at an aperture of f/5.6, an 18 mm wide angle lens has a depth of field (DOF) of 4.63 meters (0.79 m in front/3.84 m behind), a 55 mm focal length has a DOF of 0.28 m, and a 250 mm focal length has a DOF of just 0.01 m. Of course, the wider the focal length the more you have in the picture besides the flower, but generally speaking, using a longer focal length decreases the depth of field and increases the separation between your subject and its background. That said, here are the tulips.

Most of this year's tulip crop