Dutch Tulips, From the Ground and Sky.

As a travel and landscape photographer being lots of time on the road is nice, but I always try to be home during the Tulip season. This isn’t always easy as the exact timing of the blooming is always quite random. Sometimes the Tulips will show itself during April and sometimes you have to wait a bit till May. They’re usually here for a period of 2-3 weeks depending on the weather. A safe bet to visit is usually the end of April.

Most of the tourists go to our famous Tulip garden named ‘the Keukenhof’. It’s beautiful for a visit but always very crowded. Seeing the flowers outside the Keukenhof on the farmers lands is on another level. You will see endless tulips that stretch all the way to the horizon. As a Dutch landscape photographer I have taken my fair share of tulip shots over the years. But I always keep going. I love the season again and again, every year. I always have new ideas how to photograph them and always aim for different weather conditions.

This is a series of photographs I captured over the years. I have always loved capturing the flowers from ground level. I love shooting with a very wide angle and love to get up close to the tulips to get a beautiful perspective. This year I decided to complete these series with not only drone footage, but also shots taken from a small airplane from an open window.

Seeing the flowers from the sky looks like a videogame. This is mainly because of the Dutch landscape in general which consists of perfect straight lines.

The individual lines in the tulip fields are great to use as leading lines in a photo. And from the ground, these fields look endless!

By flying the drone over these fields we see visuals that are almost abstract. They look like a carpet.

We have tulips in lots of different colours.

I had wanted to capture tulips in the morning with some mist on the field for years. This year I finally managed to do it and I consider it one of my best tulip shots to date.

That particular morning did also give me the possibility of capturing this almost monotone photo that gives a great feeling of mystery.

This was captured by a drone. A very wide tulip field leading into the distance, almost like an arrow.

As I live in Amersfoort, the most convenient location for me to capture the tulips is the ‘Flevopolder’. This shot is the Flevopolder captured from an airplane.

I love capturing these tulips with dark skies. The sunset colours complement the tulip colours here. I like to experiment with that. Lots of tulip fields have different rows of tulips with different colours. In general, it’s possible to match them with the sky.

It’s great to experiment with top-down shots with a drone above the tulips. Some rows give the possibility to try abstract things. Here you see rows of red tulips with 1 row ending earlier, and a lonely red tulip in front of the ending one, almost like he’s saying ‘stop’.

Another shot of flying over the Flevopolder with a drone.

By getting very low and up close to the tulips we can play with the sun peeking through the flowers with just the right timing and positioning.

This shot shows how straight and flat the Dutch landscape is.

Does this make you think of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian?

There are a lot of windmills and wind turbines in the Netherlands, because it’s always windy! Therefore it is not easy to capture the tulips as they move through the wind. However, the wind usually dies down during the evening and early morning.

Dark skies with stormy weather makes the flowers really pop.

I love photographing the tulips with dark skies. Especially red vs deep blue is a great color combination.

And as you can see in this shot: the tulips not only have lots of different colours. They also have different sizes and shapes.