ANGELA B. PAN

Theres honestly nothing better than sitting on the edge of the reflecting pool and watching the sky explode with so much color. It brings me so much peace and happiness. This is why I love waking up for sunrise.

I know this is random but earlier this week I was thinking about what it would be like if I had my own solo exhibition. What kind of mood and experience would I want to bring to the people who came to see the show. And honestly the only thing I could think of was sitting at the edge of sunrise. Whether it was at the edge of a reflecting pool or at the edge of a rock formation but sitting there and watching the sky. I would want people to know what that feels like. With the wind blowing in my hair, watching the trees sway a little from side to side, and just listening to nothing but nature. Man, just thinking about that makes me feel so happy. Who knows if that would really happen but if it did, I would be so honored.

When people first meet me, a lot of people will say that I’m a really calm person. One person told me that it feels like I have a lot of inner peace. And a lot of times when people really get to know me, they call me quiet. I don’t know, I’m comfortable with silence. I don’t alway feel like you have to say something or do anything extra. I just like to take my time to observe and be present.

Not sure what any of this has to do with the image. It just makes me smile to think of all the amazing possibilities.

My camera settings for this image is F6.3 at 1/10th of a second and ISO 160 with my Sony A7II and 16-35mm wide angle lens.

Today is the day! Today is the day that the National Mall NPS will announce their predicted peak bloom date for the cherry blossoms. I can’t wait. I’ve been on twitter everyday this week checking out what they say and what Capital Weather Gang has to say about the weather we’ve been having and how they’d effect the Cherry trees. As a side note, I’m pretty sure I just gained 10 cool points from that last statement. LOL. As of now, I’m just excited for the big announcement!

PS. Today is also the day that my March monthly newsletter goes out. If you haven’t already, make sure to sign up. I have a couple of really exciting announcements of my own that I’ll be announcing on the newsletter first!

Ok, now back to the image on this blog post. This was taken last year, early morning on a particularly beautiful day. It was the day after it rained and it created these amazing puddles all along the Tidal Basin sidewalks. It also rained so hard that there were flower petals all over the place and it felt like you were walking in a wet wonderland of pink. I had my headphones in, rain boots on, and I was having a blast walking around capturing the beautiful trees. It was just by accident that I captured the airplane flying by but I think it makes it a little more interesting to see. I also remember having to wait a little while for this area to clear because there was a big group of people standing underneath the trees taking pictures. It was well worth it because I love the way it turned out. However if you look closely enough, you will still see one person there still taking pictures. At least she’s a little camouflaged though. HAHA.

The settings for this image is F18 at 1/50th of a second at ISO 400 with my Sony A7II and 16-35mm wide angle lens.

So you know now what I did Saturday morning. I was having fun walking around the National Mall in dense fog here and here.

But Saturday night was a different story. I was at home bored with nothing to do. LOL. So I thought I’d go through some of my San Diego images again. I don’t know if any of you other photographers out there feel like this but sometimes I just need to sit on some photos before I can edit them again. At times Ill get really excited and want to edit them all right away, but most of the time I know that doing it immediately won’t bring the best result. Sometimes I have to really envision what I want the end result to look like before anything good can come out of it. So that’s kind of what I’ve been doing with my SoCal images. Believe me, I took plenty of pics while I was there. But I felt like I had to sit and think about them for a while.

And Saturday night was the time I figured would be best to go through the images I took at the Salk Institute. It was one of my favorite places to visit while we were in San Diego. The architecture was mind blowing. I know I don’t usually do this but here are multiple angles from this place. LOL I told you I was bored. I had plenty of time on my hands to edit all of these images.

View of Salk when you first enter. My jaw dropped.

This is what Andrew typically does when we’re out taking pictures. Most likely he was looking up places for us to go eat after I was done.

Man on a phone. I think I creeped him out by taking his picture so he turned around. LOL.

Another one from this past weekend’s fog. I took this one around 6:15a while walking to the Lincoln Memorial. It was about 30-ish minutes before the sun was supposed to rise and I purposely parked my car in a spot that I usually don’t. The only reason why I did that was so I could walk to the memorial in a different direction that I usually do. I was sure I was going to see some different, interesting composition and I did! I love the way this one turned out. In order to capture it, I was standing in the middle of the road on a median but that early in the morning it didn’t really matter. There were no cars anywhere in sight. I probably stood there for a good 20 minutes waiting for some light trails or something but none showed up. I mean, it was Saturday morning at 6:15a. Where did everyone go?! LOL

I love how the fog plays with the street lights in this image. At first I was trying to shoot it at F22 so I could get some interesting starbursts coming out of them but it wasn’t really working out. I think the fog was spreading the light out too much in order to get anything. Maybe if you look at the center most one on the left hand side you can see it a little bit going on over there, but otherwise, they’re pretty much little balls of light.

Note to self: shoot this same spot on a really good sunset day and try to get some light trails in it too. That’d look so awesome. Hopefully there will be more cars at that time 🙂

The camera settings for this image is F7.1 at 2 seconds with ISO 200 and my Sony A7II with my 16-35mm wide angle lens shot on a tripod 🙂

If I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, 2018 is the year of the FOG. Forget the dog. LOL. It’s all about the fog and this past weekend did not disappoint.

Holy cow did we have fog on Saturday morning. There was a dense fog advisory all night so obviously that meant that I had to wake up super early and capture it all. It reminded me of driving in San Diego because at times while driving into the city it was difficult to even see the highway signs.

I met up with my friends Albert and Austin to shoot around the Lincoln Memorial. It was so great to meet up with them because there were points in time where the fog was sooo thick that you couldn’t see anything and if we were shooting, it was into big, grey nothingness. So we basically just stood around and chatted. But once it lifted the fog created this great atmosphere around the monuments.

This was taken right before the fog was about to cover the Lincoln Memorial again. It’s crazy how fast it went in and out. I like this image because its so monotone without me having to do anything to it. This is basically what you saw if you were there. You can see a little bit of the brown in the Canadian Geese butts and that’s it. That’s not true, there’s a little more color than that. I just wanted to say Canadian Geese butts. LOL.

My camera settings for this image is F5.6 at 1/500th of a second at ISO 400 with my Sony A7II and 28-70mm zoom lens handheld. To be completely honest, I find myself still carrying around my tripod all the time but using it less and less. If you’re interested, I can talk more about that in a future blog post.

As I was sitting here looking at this image, thinking about what I wanted to say on this blog post, Andrew walked over to my computer screen and pointed at the image. This is unusual because he said , “Hey, that’s nice!” It’s unusual because Andrew doesn’t always like my images. I’d say about 50% of the time he doesn’t like them. It’s all good though. Because 50% of the time I don’t like the shirt he’s wearing. LOL. Just kidding. I appreciate his honesty. I rather him tell me what he really thinks of my images then him lying to me and always trying to please me.

But seriously, what’s not to like about this image? It’s like you’re being showered in pink petals and I love it. I love the magnolia trees that pop up all around Washington DC in the spring. And if I’m being honest, sometimes I think I like them a little more than the Cherry Blossoms just because they’re so much bigger and more abundant. It’s also nice because you don’t have to fight the crowds to photograph them either. But this view of looking up at them is my absolute favorite. The curves in the branches are so interesting.

These particular trees are located behind the Smithsonian Castle in the Enid A Haupt Garden. My favorite place to photograph magnolia trees because there are just so many of them in one location. Now that I’m thinking about it, forget what I said earlier this week about the snow. I’m ready for the flowers!

My camera settings for this image is F4.0 at 1/160th of a second at ISO 200 with my Sony A7II and my 16-35mm wide angle. The wide angle lens was key so I could get as much as of the flowers in one frame as possible.