Melissa and Rochelle took the first official Blue Dress photos while they were visiting Colorado in 2019, then captured some Blue Dress photos in 2022, but the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival just a few hours north of where they live proved to be the perfect way to kick off 2023 as a year filled with Blue Dress photos!
Melissa and Rochelle piled in the car to head to the tulip festival and spent their time in the car catching up on everything going on in each of their lives. As they got closer to Mount Vernon, WA traffic crawled to a stop. They knew that the festival was an incredibly popular destination when the tulips are in bloom, but hadn’t anticipated quite that much traffic.
They chatted as they inched towards the parking lot at a snail’s pace, and Melissa decided to change into the Blue Dress, in the car, while she was still driving! Well, occasionally driving, with a lot of sitting still waiting for cars to move. She managed to successfully change into the Blue Dress, and even made fully changing clothes in the car look like an effortless feat.
When they arrived at the festival they began taking photos among the rows and rows of tulips. Rochelle was falling in love with nearly every single flower she encountered, but had the awareness to realize that if they were going to pursue taking photos of Melissa in the Blue Dress they needed to mix things up a bit when it came to posing, so all of the Blue Dress photos were not simply of Melissa standing and staring into the camera.
Rochelle demonstrated to Melissa where to pose, swapped lenses, then had to back wayyy up and kneel down to frame the photo so the snow-capped mountains towered over the rows of tulips, instead of merely looking like hills on the horizon.
Once again Rochelle was reminded why she prefers to be behind the camera, as Melissa looked like a princess straight out of a fairy tale, and Rochelle was strategically kneeling in a muddy field to make the photo happen.
(For those of you curious about the technical aspects, it’s Rochelle’s 85mm f/1.2 and the bokeh is silky smooth. *happy sigh*)
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