Upper panels: the CMDs from 2MASS of the upper RGB for the two 30′ × 30′ fields including our Hawk-I bulge fields in the absolute [M_K, (J − K_s)₀] plane. The empirical globular cluster RGB templates are over plotted with metallicities from [Fe/H] = −2.1 to +0.35 (see text in Sect. 5 for details on cluster names and metallicities). Black symbols indicate the stars used to derive the photometric MDF. Bottom panels: derived photometric MDF of the observed bulge fields with a bin size of 0.15 dex.