As you know last week I drove up to Mount Vernon to photograph some tulips, but the fields and fields of tulips I went to see hadn’t come into bloom yet.  What’s interesting is that I found out today that the flowers have all come out, right now it’s beautiful up there!  So I only missed it by 5 days – typical.

However, there were a few tulips starting to come out in gardens in some of the places we visited.  One example is below, I shot these flowers in Roozengaarde.

I think there were around 50 out – how funny is that!  And as you can see they were really just starting to open.  Anyway, I’m going back this weekend to get the pictures I wanted, only this time I’m taking the family with me.  Now this is always a challenge.  Lisa, James and Abi are all OK at first, they know I want to take pictures and for the first 10 minutes everything is fine.  But after that the complaining starts “Why do you take so long”, “you took that one already”, “what are you doing now”, “this is really boring” … you get the idea.

So I have to keep moving so they don’t turn on me.  Trouble is one part of me wants to go on my own and the other part really wants them to go with me.  Who knows I may even take some nice shots of them in the flowers too – we’ll have to see.

I think the Halo dudes where bored at work today, I left my office for 10 minutes and came back to find Carter trying to microwave Master Chief!

While in Mount Vernon we visited “Tulip Town”.  This is the commercial wing of a huge farm that owns acres of land and is one of the largest tulip farms in the country.  Tulip Town is a pretty cool place to visit, they have fields of tulips you can walk around, tractor trolley rides for the kids, kite flying demonstrations an art and flower shop and cafeteria.

The farm is owned by the De Goede family who came from Holland and moved to the states in the 1950’s and settled in Skagit Valley and started farming flowers.

Obviously when I was there they didn’t have any tulips!  Well it’s me and I’m just not that lucky.  They hadn’t come through yet so I had to find something else to shoot.  Actually that’s not completely true.  They had about 8 rows of tulips that had come into bloom, but every man and his dog was standing round them taking pictures.  I tried but just couldn’t get close enough to get any good shots!

There are signs everywhere saying don’t walk down the flower lanes, just stand at the end of the rows.  But of course it’s chaos there nobody seems to follow the instructions and there were people stomping all over the flowers!

There were a couple of cool buildings to shoot, one was a huge windmill (I’ll post a picture of that someday) and the other was this cool wooden hut with a water wheel.  I liked that more as it didn’t have loads of people round it, so I took some shots and the one I liked best I’m posting tonight.  It had a little garden around the hut with some of their tulips growing in it.  I thought it looked cool.

After a busy day at work with lots of meetings, Master Chief and Carter decided to go out and climb some trees.  So they did!

While in Mount Vernon over the weekend we went to visit Rosario Beach.  This is a small beach on what I think is a Native American reservation on the island of Fidalgo.  Today’s photograph was taken on the top of a peninsular overlooking Puget Sound.  I was taking some pictures looking out over the water and while the images were nice, they didn’t really grab me.

Then I saw this really cool tree.  It’s branches were kind of messed up and it looked sort of creepy and lent itself really well to a black and white image.  I got down low so the tree was above me and the sea was hidden over the hill and took the shot.

At the top of the hill there were a number of people just sitting on the grass looking out to sea.  Some people were talking, others were just lying there relaxing enjoying the sun.  It seemed that the nice weather really brought out the locals.  While this was nice it was quite hard to take a picture without people being in it.  In fact in the image below there were two guys sitting right at the top of the hill to the left of the tree.  As a result I removed them in Photoshop – cool eh?

Anyway I had a black and white image in mind when I took this and think it came out well.

For the last 100 days the Halo guys have been stuck in the house.  Sure they went out to play in the snow but they haven’t really left home!  So for the next 100 days they have decided to come to work with me and see what they can get up to.  Today Master Chief found a flower for Carter.  Not sure he really wanted it though.

Ok, so I told you that I went to Mount Vernon, and I also told you that there were no tulips, but if you remember I said that there were some daffodils.  Now the term “some” here is probably not strong enough to describe exactly how many daffodils were there but hopefully tonight’s picture gives you an idea.

As you drive around the valley, you see a number of fields like this, they are just completely covered in yellow flowers.  With a blue sky above it really is quite something, throw in some fluffy white clouds and mountains in the background and the scene becomes truly amazing.  Imagine what this looks like when you have fields and fields of colored tulips – that’s why I’m going back!

So I think I mentioned before that these were my mum’s favorite flowers, so mum, this one is for you.  I think she would have liked to see this.

Today is actually a special posting as it’s my 100th picture of the year (actually it’s 200 if you count the stupid ones I do with the Halo dudes).  I’ll be honest, I didn’t think I would get this far, but it just goes to show that anything is possible.  (Just got to do this 2.5 more times and I can give up photography for ever).

If you ask James and Abi they will tell you that there are somethings you just have to learn how to do if you are going to live in the Seeley household.  One of the most important, is learn how to make a good cup of tea.  We may now all be American, but I’ll never give up my PG Tips tea.  The Halo guys have been living here long enough now that it’s time for that right of passage, time to learn the art of tea making.

As you know (if you read this site) yesterday I went to Mount Vernon to the annual Skagit County Tulip Festival.  If you read yesterday’s posting you will also know that unfortunately the tulips hadn’t bloomed yet so I had to shoot other subjects instead.

The first place we visited was Roozengaarde which have nice manicured gardens you can walk around.  Now in Roozengaarde they actually did have a lot of flowers, some of which were tulips and I took (as you’d expect) a lot of pictures – I’m sure you’ll see many of these soon.  The gardens are broken up in to different areas by fences and flower beds and on one of the fences there were a number of decorative metal sculptures.  They have clearly been there a while as some were pretty rusty but with the sun shining I thought they looked great, so out came the camera and tripod and I grabbed some shots.

Today’s image was of one of the fence decorations, this red metal flower was right at the end of the fence and looked great against a predominantly green background.  I tried waiting until nobody was behind before I took the shot but the best I could do was one guy behind a bush, behind the flower.  So I reduced the depth of field (amount of picture that was in focus) and got the image below.

It was a lovely day and Roozengaarde is well worth a visit.

Carter was especially happy today as the Easter Bunny visited with some chocolate goodness!