Thursday, February 10, 2011

Psychedelic tulips

click photo to enlarge
On my frequent visits to churches to look at the architecture and history I often come across flowers.When a church is prepared for a wedding the nave aisle and various other places are decorated with floral arrangements. Harvest festival, Christmas and Easter are other times when the building is beautified with flowers. Then there are the church flower festivals that feature inventive displays, often on a theme, over a period of a week or so. But, these special occasions apart, flowers are invariably present in a church in smaller quantities every week of the year. These are usually supplied by parishioners, and arranged by volunteers on a "flower rota". The font cover or base, niches, the pulpit, tombs, and especially the sanctuary are the common places for such arrangements, but window sills are also places where they are frequently found.

Today's photograph shows a bunch of tulips in an earthenware jar on a church window sill. My attention was drawn to it because February sunlight was streaming through the stained glass, colouring the ancient stone and transforming the colours of the flowers and leaves. Red blooms were tinged with blue and green, and the yellow/green of the flower stalks took on a darker hue bathed in the strongly coloured light . The word that came to my mind was "psychedelic", and I thought of the album covers, posters and graphic design of the late 1960s as I looked through the viewfnder and took my photograph.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 45mm
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/50
ISO: 250
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On