ANGELA B. PAN

You know what’s really cool about waking up for sunrise? The windy air. LOL!

Sorry, bad joke. But for real, waking up for sunrise and then driving to the top of a mountain can get real chilly and Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park was no exception. I was wearing 2 pairs of pants, about 5 layers including a jacket on the top half of my body and gloves while waiting for the sun in the beginning of October. It’s totally worth it though. I love being first place and when you’re on top of Cadillac Mountain, you see the sunrise first before anyone else in the United States. YESSSSS.

But usually I’m hoping for a cloudy sunrise. The colors of the sun fill the clouds and that is my favorite time to take pictures. If it’s cloudy enough, it can make the whole sky turn a variety of colors. But it didn’t happen this day. The day that we designated to shoot sunrise from Cadillac Mountain was super clear. Not a single cloud in the sky. In this instance, I think it works though. All the rocks and textures on the bottom half of the image bring the interest in this photograph and the simplicity in the sky above just work well together. I love how there is a slight gradient but otherwise, I’m staring at that guy walking across the frame. Him being there really reminds me of what it was like being on top of the mountain. Pretty chilly but totally worth waking up early and capturing a great landscape image.

And as I was putting my camera back into my backpack, my tripod blew over and almost hit someone. Again. *face palm*

The settings for this image is 1/250th of a second at F/5.6 ISO 160 with my Sony A7II and 28-70mm zoom.

Last week I had the honor of visiting the National Gallery of Art for the new Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry exhibit. It’s a temporary exhibit but so amazing. I loved how the artists in the exhibit would portray depictions of daily life. Seemly ordinary tasks made beautiful. For example, there were multiple interpretations of a woman writing a letter but the way that these artists would light the subject or even use background imagery as important elements of art was fascinating. I took my time to study each and every single one.

My favorite piece was probably the one entitled “Astronomer by Candlelight” by Gerrit Dou. The piece itself is super tiny. I don’t have them exact measurements but it can’t be any larger than a 5×7″ picture frame. What I liked the most about it were all the details that Dou was able to fit onto this small canvas. I love the lighting and the intricate lines in the map. I found myself staring at the astronomer’s face for over 2 minutes. Everything just looked so polished and very calculated. The arched frame was very unique as well. Overall, I think this piece would look nice in my living room 🙂 Just sayin’!

But there is so much more to see!

So if you have free time in the DC area, go to the National Gallery of Art. It’s a free exhibit and you’ll fall in love. My image is the entrance to the Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting exhibit. Can you just imagine what’s inside?

The camera settings for this image is F4.5 at 1/25th of a second ISO 400 with my SonyA7II and 16-35mm wide angle lens.

Thanks again to the National Gallery of Art for the invite. I had a great time at the exhibit!

So after yesterday’s update at Shenandoah National Park, I figured I’d give an update at Great Falls Park. I used to come to this park a lot. When I was first getting started with photography in high school AND after I graduated from college (I sort of dropped off while I was in college), I’d come to this park a lot to practice. Since then I think I just got distracted with Washington DC images that I haven’t been back in a long time. It was probably last October since I’ve been back and it felt so good to hear the roar of the water again.

But I may have seen one or two trees that have already changed colors, other than that the park was mostly green. I find this to be good news though because it gives me more reasons to go back in the near future. If you’re looking for some great fall foliage shots, the falls and the Billy Goat trail are awesome to shoot.

Another reason why I sort of stopped going to Great Falls Park was that it started to close it’s gates at night. That meant I couldn’t get in for sunrise. Luckily, sunrise is around 7:20a now and I was at the gate for about 5 minutes before someone showed up to open the gate up at 7a. Pretty perfect timing if you asked me. The parking lot is pretty close to the first overlook which is where I shot this particular image. I had plenty of time to set up for this shot.

My camera settings for this image is F5.0 at 2 seconds ISO 640 with my Sony A7II and my 16-35mm wide angle lens. I also used my neutral density filter to slow down the image and create those awesome water lines on the bottom middle.

So excited to see that fall has FINALLY arrived in Shenandoah National Park. I’ve been waiting for all of October for the leave to change. Except the visibility was very low while we were there.

Yesterday my friend, Larry and I met really early in the morning to head to the Thorton Gap entrance at Shenandoah National Park. As I was pulling out of my neighborhood I could see that it was already a little foggy  where we live but the more west we went, the foggier it got. It was so exciting. Y’all know how much I love shooting in the fog. It’s my favorite weather to shoot in! But once we got there, it was SUPER foggy. Like whiteout. Sunrise is around 7:20 but we couldn’t really see any kind of daylight until 7:25a. The visibility was probably less than 100ft. At some points it looked like cars were coming out of no where because you couldn’t even see their headlights until they were really close by. It was kinda nuts but totally awesome. I’m pretty sure we said “wow, crazy” about 200 times each as we were driving through the park.

The best part was that it smelled like fog. You know that smell? Yea, the smell of happiness.

Luckily, Larry is a sony man as well and just recently purchased the 100-400mm lens. He was kind enough to let me use it for a little while, even after knowing my tripod story. I was shooting it handheld. It was a little bit heavier than I am used to, but it was still very easy to capture sharp images. I felt like a sports photographer the entire time. LOL.

My camera settings for this image is 1/60th of a second at F5.6 at ISO 1000 with my Sony A7II and Larry’s 100-400mm. The focal length of this is at 282mm.

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.

If you turned around from Bass Harbor Head Light and looked onto the water, this is the sunrise you would have seen. Heart eyes emoji!

It was the best sunrise we had seen all week! And again, I did not use my tripod to capture this, I was balancing my camera on the rocks. I really like doing that because it makes everything in the foreground look super big. A play on proportions if you will and a way to see things that you usually wouldn’t be able to see just with your naked eye.

And in the center of the water is a boui that had a bell in it. I loved it. It was so peaceful and calming to hear the bell ring whenever the wind blew it. At first I had no idea what was making the noise but once we figured it out it was like listening to church bells on a peaceful morning.

But we weren’t the only ones on the rocks savoring this sunrise. There were a few other photographers who were there and as morning went on, more and more people started to show up. At one point this guy screamed, “look a seal” and pointed to something that looked like it could have been a seal’s back sticking out of the water. I was so excited to see it because Sue and I had been looking for seals the whole week. I even pulled out my vlog camera to try to capture it. But when the “seal” didn’t move for 2 minutes and its back was still sticking out of the water, I could only assume that I was staring at a rock and missed the seal completely. Crying face emoji!

The settings for this image is 15 seconds at F5.6 ISO 320 with my Sony A7II and 16-35mm wide angle lens.