garfield circle

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Every year Washington DC welcomes millions of visitors traveling to the National Mall to take in all the sights and history. Many will start coming in the springtime to catch a glimpse of the beautiful cherry blossom trees at the Tidal Basin. They are alluring, but can sometimes be elusive. Especially when you are dealing with nature, you never know exactly when they are going to bloom or how long they will even last. In general, they will stick around for a week to 10 days. This already leaves a short window of time to see them and that doesn’t include the fact that these flowers are fragile and can fall off their branches with a sudden gust of wind or rain.

So this guide is for all you flower nature lovers who may have missed the cherry blossoms and are here to see what else the city has to offer. Don’t worry because there’s a lot! From Saucer Magnolias to Star Magnolias, Tulips and Forsythia, there is no shortage of beautiful blossoms in the city. You just have to know where to go to see them.

But if you are only interested in the cherry blossoms, I’ve got your back. Click here for the cherry blossom guide!

The National Mall:

Washington DC, especially the mall area, is a very nice area to walk. I highly suggest just taking the day to wander and get lost. There is no doubt that you will run into flowers and beautiful trees while walking around the area. Even the side streets that lead up to the Mall have pretty florets to look at. But if you’re on a time crunch, here are a few specific places to go:

Enid A Haupt Garden

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So do you remember how last week I was saying how I needed to bring my macro lens out when its raining? I did it! It rained again and my very first stop was to go back to the US Botanical Gardens. Even though it was already closed and I wasn’t able to go inside, I was still able to walk around the front entrance. There were a couple of succulent display and they were already beautiful as is. But my favorite part was how the water droplets didn’t go inside the succulents or get soaked up by them, they were just floating on top. It was so beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such well formed water droplets as I had on these succulents. This is why I needed my macro lens. There was no way I would have been able to capture all these little details with just my wide angle or even zoom.

But to be honest, I still haven’t fully switched to sony lenses. I was still using my 100mm canon lens with my metabones adaptor. It definietly slowed down the process as I was trying to make sure everything that I wanted to be in focus was sharp but I don’t know if that’s necessary a bad thing. I took my time and was happy with the outcome. I haven’t shot macro in so long and I’m happy to be dusting it off again. Soon enough I’ll get a macro sony lens. If you have any recommendations, let me know!

The settings for this image was F9 at 1/80th of a second and ISO 800 handheld. It was still cloudy from the storm and getting that close up was difficult. I had to bump up my ISO to make sure the exposure was fast enough.