How many lips?

Okay, I have shot my fair share of flowers. I'm not noted for it - no one will ever remember me as a shooter of flowering things - well, no one will remember me for shooting most anything more than likely. But when I do shoot flowers, it has tended to come rather easily - flower, frame, shoot, done. That looks nice.

And then I tried to shoot some tulips in our sunroom. I'm sure someone more experienced than I can offer an explanation; all I can do is tell you that it f...ing hard to shoot tulips. The first thing I noticed is that my beloved Olympus, which is brilliant at getting colours right, kept getting the colours wrong (an orange-y red in this case). And then the texture - somehow, it is really, really hard to get on film (well, digital sensor). I don't know if it is the waxiness of them or the semi-transparency of their leaves, I have no clue. I just know it took a whole lot of shots and some serious editing to get the two pictures below.

In fact, I ended up using the layered focus stacking feature on the Olympus - and even that didn't really get it. But it was the only thing that got close to that elusive waxy translucence that they have.

I wonder if i'ts the tulips getting back at us somehow? Before the Beatles, there was tulip mania (I'm not making this up). Some guy brought them to Holland in the 1500's from Turkey and at the height of their popularity in the 1600's, a single bulb would sell for 10 times a craftsman's yearly income. Supposedly, a lot of speculators lost money when the prices crashed shortly after.

Anyway, here they are. I'm calling them (very creatively) Tulip 1 and Tulip 2. Ergo, two-lips - get it? Thank you.

Here's the next day, and the best I could get for actually capturing the tulips' texture. I simply couldn't get it in a single shot - this is focus stacked. f3.5, 1/40 sec, ISO 400, 30mm macro lens, raw file, fairly heavy editing for colour and light.