Tulip Two-step

I’m having a lot of fun in our multimedia class this quarter. I love mixing together a voice over, a touch of music and eye-catching images to tell a story. The hard part has been getting the courage to take pictures and video of people. Personally, I hate being on film, so I sometimes feel like I am torturing my subjects when I’m standing on the other side of the camera, snapping away. Also, my lack of experience with lighting, lenses and layout means I’m slow and I make mistakes (back lighting an interview? super fail. will.not.repeat).

As training wheels for my first project, I found a subject that has all the time in the world and no sense of self-consciousness: a crops of tulips blooming on my deck. One day, I noticed that on a particularly warm afternoon, the flowers had opened wide, so that the petals were practically perpendicular to the stem. I thought this movement would be a nice subject for a slide show. On picture day, the weather didn’t get quite as warm as I would have hoped, so the flowers didn’t open as dramatically as I had first noticed. Nonetheless, the flowers did get in their daily stretch and made no complaints as I set up each shot and adjusted all the camera’s widgets.

Here’s what I came up with: