ANGELA B. PAN

First of all, Happy Valentine’s Day LOVES!!!! I personally don’t think Valentine’s day is only for your significant other. I think Valentine’s day should be shared with everyone you love – family, friends, internet friends.  So I wish you a day full of smiles and hugs and pizza 🙂 Who doesn’t love pizza, am I right?

But I thought it was appropriate to post about 2 of my favorite places. The airport and the National Mall.  National Mall is a given but the airport is one of my favorite places to hang out. It’s the best place to people watch, theres always a huge variety of food to select from and each airport is so different from one another. Sometimes I just like going early to sit and watch. Is that weird? I dunno, I think my love of airports started from a young age visiting the Las Vegas airport. Now that’s a cool airport!! I always imagine walking through the airport with my mom and she’d always imitate her favorite noise, “cling cling cling cling” goes the sound of the slot machines. LOL.

Anyways… if you read my last blog post about flying out of Reagan National Airport, then I’m sorry, I think I gave you the wrong information. LOL. Turns out you can see the National Mall even when you’re flying south. I captured this image on our way down to Orlando. Again, I was sitting on the right hand side of the airplane and it worked! I really don’t know how the runways work for which direction you’re flying but it’s a pretty safe bet that if you’re going to see the National Mall, you’ll see it on the right hand side when flying out of DCA. Don’t get me wrong though, there are certain times when you won’t see it. I haven’t quite figured that part out yet. I’ll keep you updated!

My settings for this image is F8 at 1/1000th of a second at ISO 800 with my Sony A7II and 28-70mm zoom lens.

So you know that one of Sue’s highlights from the trip was the Ocean Path. If I had to pick mine, it would have been the airplane tour we did on our last night in Maine with Acadia Air Tours. We booked the “airvan” for 35 minutes at sunset. It was perfect because the plane was actually built for sightseeing.

But if you have never been on a scenic airplane tour, I have 2 photo tips for you:

1. Constantly check your images. The beginning of the flight was perfect. I had the correct settings to make sure I wasn’t getting any motion blur in my images. But as the sun was setting towards the end of our flight, I did not realize how much the light had changed.  I should have bumped up my ISO or something because all the images towards the end of the flight were so blurry. I wasn’t upset or anything, I still had a rockin’ time on the flight. Just check your images as you go!

2. Zoom lens all the way. I brought my 70-200mm just in case, but didn’t feel like I needed it at all. We were only up 2000ft max in the air and I was still able to get pretty good zoom-age with my 28-70mm. I say zoom instead of a wide angle because there were times when there would be a lot of sun glare on the windows. Especially when we were faced a certain way, it was very difficult to avoid it. At least with the zoom lens, I was able to avoid those spots as opposed to a wide angle or something that would have captured it all. Sue was taking pics with her phone and said that the sun glare was really difficult to avoid the entire trip. All of her photos had at least a spot.

So if you’re in Acadia National Park and want to see it from a different point of view or even have a totally different experience, I’d highly recommend Acadia Air Tours. Bernard was our pilot and he was so nice. It was very easy to talk to him and I didn’t feel like I was bothering him with the million and one questions I was asking 🙂  And if you do book a trip with them, tell them I sent ya!

This was taken at the beginning of our flight and my camera settings for this image is 1/25th of a second at F5.6 ISO 640.

Somehow I’m lucky enough to live right in the middle of two awesome airports, Dulles International Airport and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.  But for some reason, I’m always flying out of Dulles. So when the rare opportunity comes up to fly out of Reagan, I take FULL ADVANTAGE! I do my research and try to figure out where I can sit on the plane to make sure I get the birds eye view of the National Mall. If you want to do the same, read on…

I know you can see the monuments if you’re flying north of DC and about 50% sure you can see them when you’re flying west of the city. You definietly won’t see them if you’re flying south. So if you’re flying north, try to sit on the right hand side of the plane. Obviously, when you’re flying back to DC, sit on the left hand side. If you aren’t able reserve those seats, you’ll still be able to get pretty cool views of the Pentagon and Air Force Memorial on the opposite side so be on the look out for those. Either way, window seats are key! And have your camera ready right at take off or when you are descending. It’s  surprising how fast the memorials will pop into your window. You’ll see them as you’re climbing your way up to the clouds or when you’re right about to touch down.

In order to take this image, I was sitting in the window seat, but I had to lean into the middle seat to capture it. My intention was to capture the light coming from the window and use it to frame the monuments. I really like this image, but I also wish I went a little closer to capture only the monuments. Oh well! There’s always next time:

My settings for this image is 1/3200 of a second at F/8 ISO 1000 with my 16-35mm wide angle lens and Sony A7II.

Views from the top of the world. Love this perspective that a lot of tourists don’t get to see. If you’re interested in something like this and visiting Tokyo, definietly definietly check out EYExplore. I highly recommend them and tell them I sent you 🙂

In other news, today is a travel day. I’m going somewhere veryyyy icey. Can you guess?