4.18.2010

25,000 Daffodils at Tower Hill Botanic Garden

The gardens at Tower Hill are beginning to bloom.  The blooming trees are fabulous.  My favorite is the pear tree, which has a unique flowery-peary-smell to it and was covered with very happy bees.  The second to last image below, showing white flowers is from the pear tree.  The final picture, though it shows a bee, is some other pretty flower.

The field which later in the season will be covered with wildflowers was instead covered with Tower Hill's "signature" 25,000 daffodils. The image below captures perhaps half of the field.

The normal focal length snapshots were taken with my pocket camera as I didn't want to switch lenses from the 70-300mm lens on the Olympus.  The closeups were taken with the 70-300.  Typically I set the lens at 150mm  which allows me to fill the frame with a 3-4" subject at a focusing distance of 3.1'.  This is a very nice working distance.

But the closeup of the three daffodils was shot at 300mm due to the fact that these were in the formal garden where I needed to stay on the path.  I think the flowers were about 10 feet away.  The crop was minor, essentially cropping the Olympus's native 4:3 aspect ration to 3:2.