ANGELA B. PAN

One crazy cold morning I met up with my friend, Albert to shoot the sunrise. I remember the day before I heard on the radio that we were expecting a lot of fog and obviously I got really excited and told Albert about it. The weather can be so finicky because I woke up the next morning to one of the clearest skies ever! I’m so sorry Albert I made you get out of bed so early in the morning! Plus it was crazy cold and windy. It was probably one of the shortest sunrise sessions I’ve ever had. 20 minutes and I was back in my car.

But as we were about to leave, I noticed the beautiful light that was coming from the front of the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial. I asked Albert to stand right at the light ray and I love the way that this turned out. It’s so simple with the little pop of “warm” light. But I think my favorite part is the overall cool-ness to the image. I love how blue and cold it feels because that’s exactly what it felt like being there. Remember how I was saying this is a composition I wanted to keep on working on? Click here to read my previous post about the MLK Jr Memorial. 

To be honest though it’s not exactly what I had intended from the original post. It’s a little bit closer to what I had in mind and I’m still very happy with it. I’m going to keep at it until I get it exactly how I envision it.

Did I mention it was crazy cold that morning? LOL.

The camera settings for this image is F7.1 at 1/125th of a second at ISO 125 with my Sony A7II and 16-35mm wide angle lens.

I didn’t take this image this past Saturday, I took it a couple years ago but it is still one of my favorite snow images I’ve taken.  There are so many things going on in this image but its still so simple. I love the white on white tonality. I also really enjoy how you can barely see the Washington Monument. But my favorite part is seeing the little bit of reflection on the floor surface of the Lincoln Memorial with the little puddles of water and snow blocking the entirety. I think it’s little details like that make the image so interesting to look at.

But what do you think? Would you rather have one more good blanket of snow? or are you ready for spring flowers? I think I could go for one more snow day. But please keep it in February. I don’t want them messing with the Cherry Blossoms again like it did last year.

My camera settings for this image is F7.1 at 1/125th of a second at ISO 100 with my Canon 5D Mark II and 24-105mm lens. LOL I told you this was an older image. You know because I shot this on my Canon.

Which is funny because recently I’ve had quite a few people asking me about switching camera brands. To be honest, I love my Sony and I can’t imagine ever going back to Canon. No offense to Canon but that camera is just a beast. Its so big and bulky and after a while it just got to be too much to carry around on my back. I’m so happy with Sony. I love how easy and free I feel with my camera now. I really can’t imagine shooting with any other camera other than a mirrorless one. I’m hooked!

Before we left to Orlando, I had an itchy throat. I spent most of last week in bed when we got back. I’m not sure if it was the flu or not. We don’t actually own a thermometer but it was horrible to say the least. I have no idea what happened last Tuesday because I slept through it all. But I started to feel a lot better on Saturday and even better on Sunday. Funny how I was good to go by the weekend 🙂

Anyways, we got some pretty decent snow on Saturday. It didn’t stick for too long but I knew I wanted to go out on Sunday morning to shoot the sunrise. Usually when we get crazy weather like we did on Saturday, the sunrise on the next day will be just as crazy. And it was!!! It felt so good to be outside again. I met up with my friend, Birch and spent the morning walking around the Lincoln Memorial and National Mall.

It was sort of foggy and hazy but it was going in and out as well. I don’t know, its really hard to describe because it was weather like I’ve never seen before. But if I had to use one word to describe it, I’d call it “beautifuuullll” because it created this amazing glow. The best of the best glow was down the line of trees that run along side the Reflecting Pool. I love how it enclosed all the light at the end of the “tunnel”. I also really like how the World War II memorial is at the end of this walkway but you can barely make it out. Seriously this city looks so different everyday.

My camera settings for this image is F5.6 at 1/100th of a second and ISO 200 with my Sony A7II and Birch’s 70-200mm lens because I didn’t have mine with me 🙂

I took this image almost a year ago during Cherry Blossom season on that one crazy foggy morning we had. If you look closely enough, you can make out the cherry blossom trees in the background. But my focus for this image were on the birds that were flying in the foreground.

I know there has to be quite a few fish swimming around in the Tidal Basin. It’s not uncommon to see a couple of people out there fishing in the mornings, once in a while you’ll hear a random splash in the water and there’s always birds circling. 3 indications that in fact, there are fish in the tidal basin. So there are usually always a fair amount of birds that are on the water fishing. (What’s even cooler is when you can capture them all flying away together.) I thought it would be interesting to see if I could get a cool image of the birds and the fog, so for a good 10 minutes my focus went from photographing the flowers to the birds.

Then this one guy started flapping his wings like he was about to take off. Bird photography isn’t always my thing so I just took a few snap shots and kept it moving. It wasn’t until I got home and could view this image large on the computer screen that I noticed all the cool ripples it was creating. I also really like the reflection within those ripples. Overall I am just really happy with the way this turned out. I think it’s a pretty cool portrait of the scary flying creature about to take off.

And if you don’t know, I’m not a huge fan of birds. 

My settings for this image is F6.3 at 1/125the of a second at ISO 200 with my Sony A7II and 28-70mm lens.

Sometimes I run out of things to talk about in these blog posts. So I googled one of those online quiz thingys and thought I’d answer some of them for you. Let’s see how this goes…

1. What are your nicknames? What do you prefer to be called?
My cousins on my mom’s side all call me ‘Angie’. My cousins on my dad’s side call me ‘Ang’. Somewhere between middle school and high school friends started calling me ‘Pangie’. I respond by all those names but always just introduce myself as ‘Angela’. I like it when people call me by nicknames though. It makes me feel like they’re comfortable enough with me to call me by another name.

2. What books on your shelf are begging to be read?
I’ve started all of them. I’ve finished about half. I’m mostly into self improvement books and biographies.

3. How often do you doodle? What do your doodles look like?
Not often at all but I used to all the time when I was bored in school. If I do, it’s like those line pattern things that quickly fill up the whole page.

4. What do you do if you can’t sleep at night? Do you count sheep? Toss and Turn? Try to get up and do something productive?
I usually get out of bed and go sit on the couch or something and read until I feel sleepy enough to fall asleep.

5. How many days could you last in solitary confinement? How would you do it?
2 days max but I would need my camera, laptop (only for photoshop) and a puzzle.

6. Who performs the most random acts of kindness out of everyone you know?
My husband, Andrew for sure! He’s always doing nice things for people, even without them knowing.

7. Are you a creature of habit? Explain.
Ummm… Yes! Daily blogging, I maintain an exercise routine of M,W,F and Saturday workouts, every morning I eat the same exact breakfest, the list seriously goes on and on.

8. When making an entrance in to a party, do you make your presence known? Do you slip in and look for someone you know? Do you sneak in quietly and find a safe spot to roost?
Slip in and look for someone I know. If I don’t know anyone, I head straight to the bar 🙂

9. What is your strongest sense? If you had to give one up, which would it be?
I’m guessing my strongest sense is sight? But if I had to give one up it would be smell as long as I could still taste without my smell.

10. Which animals scare you most? Why?
Ostriches. They are the root of my fear of birds. When I was little I had a reoccurring nightmare that one would pop it’s little head out of the ground, chase me, and peck at my hair. They’re big, scary and I don’t like them.

LOL How was that? Let me know if you liked this and maybe I’ll do more in the future.

The camera settings for this image is F4 at 2.5 seconds ISO 1250 with my Sony A7II 16-35mm lens and 10 stop neutral density filter.

If you haven’t noticed, one of my all time favorite things to photograph are the cherry blossoms at the Tidal Basin every spring. It may get crowded and it may get over done, but I don’t know I just love them. It makes me so happy to walk around these big trees and feel like flowers are all around me. My absolute favorite is when we get a little gust of wind and you see the pedals flying off the trees. It’s literally like I’m in a winter wonderland of pretty, pink petals and I just get that warm fuzzy feeling inside.

So I started thinking, why do I like photographing these flowers so much? I think it all started from my Grandma. I call her Nai Nai. She lived with us all throughout my elementary school years. One of the clearest visions I have from that time is sitting at a desk with her and watching her paint Chinese water color paintings. I remember she’d spend hours practicing her strokes. She’d have one piece of paper and practice painting the same flower over and over again. I just loved watching it.

I’m not much of a painter but her love of flowers have rubbed off on me. If you look up from my desk, one of the first things you’ll see is one of her flower paintings (still waiting to be framed) and it makes me so happy. I think I’m subconsciously channeling my Nai Nai when I’m out taking pictures of the cherry blossoms.  Recently we were looking through my phone and I was showing her some of my photography. Every time I showed her a flower image, she’d look up at me, smile and say “PRETTY!” Other memorials and things, not so much. But if there was a flower, “PRETTY!” 😀

The settings for this image is F6.3 at 1/15th of a second at ISO 200 with my Sony A7II and 16-35mm wide angle lens.