ANGELA B. PAN

Happy Monday! Can’t believe May is here! Did you guys check out the desktop and cell phone wallpapers? I do them every first of the month and love them.  Or if you haven’t yet, make sure to sign up for my newsletter. You’ll receive them straight into your inbox. What could be easier? If you use them, send me a screen shot. I have a folder on my desktop that’s called ‘happy’ and I put all of my favorite screenshots in there. If I’m ever feeling down or anything, I always look in that folder and feel uplifted. As you may have noticed I have tons of other folders on my desktop, maybe one day you’ll find out what they all are. Or if you’ve even be interested in that? It’s sort of the method behind all my madness. LOL.

This image was shot in 2013 when I was still using my Canon 5d Mark II. I recently found it on one of my old drives and been having a good time looking through some past images. I love this one with all the greens and different lines. I think my favorite part is the path leading off to the edge of the image. I still remember shooting this. It was on an early morning walk through the Blue Ridge Mountains. I was staying in a yert with some of my friends and a few of us decided to explore the surrounding area. I love how that foggy weather just lingers all morning in the mountains. Perfect mood lighting for a great, calm day.

My settings for this image was F7.1 at 1/20th of a second with ISO 200. I shot this with my 17-40mm wide angle lens on a tripod.

Wow that was a lot of links in just one blog post but in case you were wondering, I was a backstreet boys girl allllll the way. Still love you, Nick.

Taken just 10 minutes before I captured this image. I had really high hopes of a colorful sky but it didn’t turn out as planned. It’s all good though. You win some and loose some. Although I wouldn’t actually call this loosing. The purple in the clouds was an unexpected surprise. The light bursts in the street lamps make this image twinkle and the subtle car light trails on the road makes your eye travel right along the image.

When I’m really happy with a shot, I usually take it a few times. Maybe like 2 or 3 times just to make sure I got everything in focus and exposed correctly before moving on. But for some reason, right after I was done shooting this I just kept it moving. I didn’t think it turned out the way I wanted at that moment in time. Looking at it again though, I enjoy it. I feel like I see a new twinkle of light or a new reflection along the statue with every glance. Or something like that. Bahh can you tell I’m having a love/hate relationship with this image. Let me know what you think of it. Do you like it or am I just going crazy?

For all you photographers out there who are interested, here are my camera settings: F/18 at 15 seconds ISO 50. Not sure why it was shot at F/18. I usually would set my camera to F/22 for images like this but I was still able to capture the image the way I wanted it. Definietly shot on a tripod for this 15 second exposure.

Hope you all have a great weekend! Not much planned for me except a girls night in with some of my closest girlfriends tonight. Other than that, I’ll be here and there like the wind. HAHA.

Sometimes finding a new point of view can be difficult. Especially if you’ve visited the same location multiple times. That’s always the problem that I have visiting the memorials. How can I make it look different from all the other times I’ve shot it. Sometimes I try to go at different times of day, other times I’ll make sure the sky is really unique or different. I’ll shoot high or I’ll shoot low. But I always try to make the memorials that I love so much different in each of my posts. So when I saw this puddle I was super excited. It was just this gigantic puddle in the middle of the grass/dirt. I got some crazy looks from people when I kneeled down to get closer to it, but I think it was all worth it in the end. There were people who even stopped next to me just to get down low to see what I was looking at. LOL. Some people may not get it but these puddle shots are quickly becoming some of my favorite to shoot.

The camera settings for this was F7.1 at 1/100th of a second at ISO 160. It was a pretty cloudy day. A storm was expected to hit a few hours later (and you know how I can’t resist shooting in storms). My main focus was to get everything even and symmetrical. I think my favorite part about this image is the tree leaning over. When you’re standing up you barely notice it, but I think with the reflection in the puddle the curvature is a little more exaggerated. It really acts as a leading line to bring you through the whole image.

Anyways, hope you all have a great weekend filled with fun, amazing light and beautiful views. We’re celebrating my brother and my grandma’s birthdays tonight with some Turkish food!

So heres my image from Grand Central Terminal that I was talking about yesterday. I still think it’s craziness that I’ve never been there before. What a beautiful transit station. It kind of gives you that old world feeling with all the train markers. Everyone always talks about how beautiful the ceiling is but I thought it was funny how there were so many lost balloons up there. My favorite part was definietly the people watching. Its my favorite part about any airport, bus station or place like that. Everyone’s always so busy with their lives, somewhere they got to be. It’s just interesting watching the interaction of it all. Otherwise, there were so many other photographers there! It was pretty cool. You can definietly tell the guys on the left side of this image were taking a time-lapse. They were standing in the same position with their tripods for quite some time. But then there were people taking selfies and other people next to me who were taking similar pics.

I didn’t bring a tripod with me for this trip. It was going to be too much of a hassle considering I knew we weren’t going to be taking any sunrise or sunset pics. But standing here in Grand Central was the only time I wish I had one. Luckily, using the ledge for my long exposure  turned out great. My camera settings for this image were F/14 at 4 seconds ISO 100. I love the mixture of people on the go and people just standing there. This is what I mean by watching the interaction of so many different kinds of people all in one place and this wasn’t even the busiest time of day to be there. I think we took this around noon because right afterwards we went across the street for some pizza 😀

Last week I said ‘goodbye’ to my friend, Navin. If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll know that we’ll randomly meet up and shoot together. He was one of the first people I ever met in the DC photo community and it’s so crazy to think he won’t be here anymore. Our mutual friend, Joe threw him a little going away party and what do photographers do when they’re moving away? Obviously we get together and shoot one last sunset before heading off to get some drinks at a near by bar.

It was the perfect send off. All day we had crazy weather. I think I saw weather reports saying we had three tornados touch down in DC on that day. At some points it was even hailing. Luckily, when we met up the rain had stopped for a little bit. The clouds were racing above us and we were able to get some super moody shots. Then without any warning, it started to downpour. It wasn’t so bad because even through the downpour, there was still this amazing light that shined through the clouds that made everything illuminate and it was so beautiful.

This image was shot at F7.1 at 1/200th of a second ISO 400. Again, the clouds were pretty crazy and dark this day but I was super excited to get that one little clearing above the dome. Its my favorite part of this image because it looks like a little halo over the United States Capitol Building.

Its always fun shooting with people who have the same interests in photography as you. It was just a bonus that you ended up being a cool person as well. Best of luck in the Bay Area, Navin! Come back and visit and we’ll shoot again 🙂

Obviously, one of my favorite parts of spring time in Washington DC are the cherry blossoms and all the other trees that bloom flowers but I love the tulips too. They’re almost everywhere you go. All the memorials and monuments have tulips somewhere that you can use them as foreground. It just makes me feel so happy when I see them. These flowers in particular belong to the Floral Library that’s right at the Tidal Basin. Luckily they’re facing the Washington Monument and are perfect for a photoshoot. For example… LOLOL

Even at a young age, my mom would teach me to appreciate flowers. I don’t remember a time where we didn’t have a garden at our house. But I’m pretty sure I didn’t pose myself like that. It looks very similar to something my mom or grandma would make me do. I even have pictures of them posing me in different poses to prove that I was just there little doll to take pictures of. I’d think some people would be unhappy about that. I still love it. I think it’s so funny and it’s fun to see pictures of my grandma interacting with me. Plus, if I came up with my own pose, I’m pretty sure my tongue would of been out for this adorable moment in time. HAHAHA.

So for the first image, the camera settings were f7.1 at 1/60th of a second ISO 320. I bumped up my ISO a little more for this since it was a cloudy day but it was also fairly windy. I wanted the flowers to be still in this image so I tried my best to get my shutter faster without making it too noisy.

No clue what the settings were for the second image. I’m confident that it was shot on automatic camera though. Noob.