ANGELA B. PAN

Home from another amazing weekend in New York. I seriously love going to that city and I don’t think I’ve ever said “photo” so much in my life. But it was all worth it because PhotoPlus was so much more than I expected. To be honest, it was a little overwhelming. So while I’m still digesting everything that happened, here’s a little image I captured of the General Andrew Jackson Statue located close to the White House in Washington DC right before I left on the trip.

My favorite part of this image is how simple it is, but I also love the framing. The American Flag in the background is the flag you see on top of the White House and it was just in perfect alignment with General Jackson and his hat. Patriotic but effortless all at the same time. LOL. I think the cloudy day even worked well for this shot to simplify this image even more.

I plan on spending the day going through the images I captured in New York over the weekend. More about that soon!

My camera settings for this image are F7.1 at 1/40th sec and ISO 400 with my Sony A7II and 70-200mm zoom lens.

It’s October and it still feels like it is summer in the Washington DC area. The average temperatures have been high 70s and I still find myself walking around in shorts but believe me I’m ok with it! Totally not the cool temps that I’m used to for this time of year but my favorite part about it is that we’ve been waking up to some amazing fog these past few days.

For me, fog is a little more difficult to capture than a beautiful sunrise. I have apps and things to help me figure out if the sunrise is going to be nice but fog seems to be more elusive. It just seems to pop out of nowhere and it’s a huge surprise. So obviously, the past few times that I woke up to try to capture it, it wasn’t there. But the days I decide to “sleep in” (sleeping-in to me is waking up at 6a), it shows up when I’m out for our morning walk with Frankie. Its ok though because I actually have quite a few images of fog from earlier this year and even from a few years back.

This particular image was taken on Christmas day in 2015. It’s an image that I had wanted to capture for a while. I love how the fog is covering the bottom half of the Jefferson Memorial but you can still see the reflection in the water. It just gives off this creepy, halloween vibe and I love it.

Hopefully these foggy mornings will stay for a while so I have more opportunities to capture it in a different ways. By the way, this image is in color. It was just THAT grey out with all that fog.

My camera settings for this image is F9 at 1/50th sec at ISO 200 with my Sony A7II and 28-70mm zoom lens.

Here’s a crazy example of how foggy the Tidal Basin can actually get on any given winter morning. I mean come on! You can barely see anything in this image which I think makes it pretty cool. Its like you have to look really deep and kind of know what you’re looking at in order to make any sense of it. If I didn’t tell you, would you have even known? The most interesting part to me is that you can still see a slight hint of the Washington Monument’s reflection but I love the fact that you can see the rain drops in the water. Look at the bottom right hand corner. I love that trail of drops leading to the Monument. It must be something special if you can capture fog and rain all in the same image.

Here’s what it would usually look like if it weren’t foggy.

My camera settings for this image is F4.5 at ISO 320 at 1/640th of a second with my Sony A7II and 16-35mm wide angle handheld. As far as editing, I didn’t do much. I upped the contrast a bit just so you can see the monuments a little bit better and that’s pretty much it! Full on color image of what it looked like that one special Sunday morning.

PS Sorry not sorry there have been so many fog pictures lately. I love shooting the fog and the mood it brings. But I feel like 2018 has been especially foggy for me for some reason. I’ve never had so many wonderful opportunities to shoot in the weather and I’m taking full advantage! I just hope we get more days like this during cherry blossom season like we did that one time last year. That was seriously one of the best days ever. This is probably a close second <3

Let me know what you think about this image. Its really different from what I usually do but I still really like it and it was a total accident. I didn’t even know that I took this until the other day when I was looking for another image to edit.

So on the same foggy morning that I took this picture of the Washington Monument, I was out with my camera on my tripod shooting. Obviously. But I actually went to the tidal basin with the intentions of shooting the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial. When I arrived, I saw that the fog was so amazing that I couldn’t resist taking a few shots of the Tidal Basin and the Jefferson Memorial. So in the series of images, this was the very last image I took right before I began shooting MLK JR. memorial. I know I was bracketing my shots because this was a long exposure and I’m assuming I just got impatient for the last shot to finish and just picked up my tripod. Pretty cool, huh?

My favorite part is how aligned everything is. I literally must have lifted the tripod up straight in the air for that to happen. I didn’t do much in processing either. I just added a little bit of contrast and that was it.It’s basically straight out of the camera. I also like how it’s kind of monotone grayish blue. What do you think. Should I try some more experimental long exposures? For some reason, it reminds me of this meme from SpongeBob SquarePants of Mr Krab. Like you just woke up from a really long nap and you don’t know what time it is, what day it is, or what is actually going on. LOL

My settings for this image was F/32 at 2 seconds ISO 50.

So funny story. Remember how yesterday I said that the cherry blossom won’t be peaking this year? I was wrong. I wrote that post way to soon because guess what?! Only half the cherry blossoms were really effected by the snow last week. It’s like a huge sigh of relief. I really look forward to this time of year every year and I really didn’t want to miss out on it this time. So for the last 50% of the cherry blossoms remaining, they’re expected peak date is now March 22-25th which is only a few days from now!!!

I went out Sunday morning to meet up with a local instagram group called, Walk with Locals. I had been to some of their events before but this was their one year birthday so I had to go. I hate missin’ out on a good time. Even though it was wet, rainy, and snowing, there was an impressive amount of people who showed up at sunrise. We walked around the tidal basin but I kind of stayed in the back of the crowd. Eventually I was the only one walking by myself when I saw this duck.

Its not uncommon to see ducks in DC, especially around the water. But this one was actually on the sidewalk. So I approached him slowly and calmly and he didn’t seem to mind me at all. We then started having our own little photoshoot. I intentionally got low so I could try to get the “cherry blossoms”, Washington Monument, and duck all in one frame. My settings were  F6.3 1/100th of a second ISO 400 with my 16-35mm wide angle lens. I had to bump up my ISO high even though we were outdoors because I didn’t want any motion from the duck. It was so very grey and dark, it was difficult to get a fast enough shutter speed to make sure everything was sharp.

Anyways, Happy Birthday Walk with Locals! You guys are awesome.

And you know what else is awesome? Cherry Blossoms! I’ll be out there shooting. And if you are too, come say hi!

Even on a cloudy day, the cherry blossoms still look beautiful. But I really hope that the rain we’re expecting in the DC area doesn’t knock the flowers off the branches. I’m having such a great time photographing these trees. I don’t want the fun to stop!!