Photographing a field of tulips at sunset is a beautiful scene, but you will need to master a few techniques in order to capture the scene. The first is reproducing the high dynamic range of light at sunset. With today’s excellent masking tools in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw, you might be able to get away with a single exposure by masking the sky and significantly lower the exposure, and masking the foreground and increasing the exposure. Sometimes this works fine, but often the resultant image will be very noisy. I recommend instead making two exposures, one set for the sky, and one set for the foreground, and then blending them with layers and masks in Photoshop. Another option is to take a bracketed set of three exposures and use HDR software to merge them.
The second technique is managing the depth of field for sharp focus in your image. If you are not getting up close to the flowers in your immediate foreground, you can use one shot for achieving acceptable focus throughout the scene. You do this by setting your focal point approximately one third of the way into your image (called the hyperfocal distance) and using a small aperture setting of f16.
If you choose to get up close and accentuate the flowers closest to your camera with a wide-angle lens, you will need to take several images using at least two different focal lengths (one set to the flowers very close to the camera and one set to the flowers further back in the image). These images with different focal lengths can likewise be stacked and blended in Photoshop to ensure the flowers closest to you and the flowers further back in the scene are all in sharp focus.
Another option, if you have access to a Tilt-Shift lens, is to tilt the lens barrel down toward the flowers, which shifts the focal plane from the normal vertical orientation down to a more horizontal plane. This extends the distance out that the flowers will be in focus. Tilt-shift lens are expensive and tricky to use, but can produce beautiful results.
