ANGELA B. PAN

So yesterday was one of the best days ever! I’m still trying to comedown from the high.  Andrew and I attended the Ball for the Mall and it was the most beautiful, exciting, and inspiring evening ever. Thanks again to the Trust of the National Mall for the invitation and using my images throughout the entire event. Everything was absolutely incredible. Promise I’ll share some images from the evening soon. I’m still trying to gather all my thoughts about the night.

In the meaning time, here’s a pretty picture of the cherry blossoms 🙂 LOL. Like I said yesterday, I didn’t create too many images with the Jefferson Memorial and the cherry blossoms this year. I feel like it’s been done so many times that it’s difficult to make it different. So on that same day that I managed to shoot with very low battery, I grabbed this image. Initially it was the sun burst that caught my attention, but I’m a sucker for using the cherry trees to frame subjects. My favorite is the light that’s coming through the flowers. Doesn’t it make you feel all warm inside?

This is why we need to help preserve the National Mall and other national parks across the country. So that people can appreciate beautiful scenes like this forever and ever. Government funding only goes so far. We need additional resources that will help keep the cherry blossom trees healthy and all of our monuments and memorials safe and clean. The National Mall is a unique national park because it’s located within a city. We get so much foot traffic that eventually things are going to wear and tear. Please click here to find out how you can help.

My camera settings for this image is F22 at 1/100th of a second at ISO 400 with my Sony A7II and 27-70mm handheld. 

Ok, back to more cherry blossoms images 🙂

Another one of my goals this season was to capture the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial with the cherry blossoms. If I was going to be at the Tidal Basin, I wanted to try different things from what I typically do. Going back and looking at my images, I barely have any of the Jefferson Memorial and the cherry blossoms. So weird, right? Last year they were like peanut butter and jelly. This year it was like the Jefferson Memorial didn’t even show up to the party.

I also realized that I don’t have very many images of the Martin Luther King Jr memorial in general, let alone with the cherry blossoms. So anytime I was close or even from far away, I was trying out different compositions. I was determined to get something I liked.

This one was taken about 30 minute before sunrise. As you can see, another windy morning but I love the color combination of the pink flowers with the blueish looking sky. We got real lucky this year. We had almost two solid weeks of cherry blossoms, compared to last year when we didn’t even have a week. So I had time to play with compositions. I still haven’t gone through all the images yet, but this one stood out to me. I like how he still looks very powerful and determined with the cherry blossom framing him. Like nothing can distract him, not even pretty flowers. On the other hand, I’m the one who’s driving around and will break for pretty flowers growing in people’s yards and point them out to all my passengers. Ask Andrew. He’s not a fan of when I do that. LOL

My camera settings for this image is F5.6 at 0.6 seconds and ISO 500 with my Sony A7II and 28-70mm lens on my gitzo tripod.

Finallyyyy a sunny day at the Tidal Basin. So far this cherry blossom season has been very cloudy, grey, and windy. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I prefer blue skies with my pink flowers. I think the color combination works so well together. So I was thrilled when we finally had clear skies and s-u-n.

This particular day I was not planning on being at the Tidal Basin, instead I parked my car along Ohio drive and I had every intention of staying on Ohio drive and shooting the cherry blossoms along the Potomac river. That quickly changed because I thought I saw some fog coming off the Tidal Basin and you know me and fog. It’s like a magnetic connection we have. I ran over to the basin and saw nothing. It was probably some kind of mirage or wishful thinking for some fog and cherry blossoms but either way, I’m glad I ended up there. Once the sun actually came up, the light hitting the blossoms was amazing! I couldn’t have asked for a better lighting situation. I could have asked for a better battery situation because out of the 3 batteries I had with me, I only had enough charge for about 30 minutes of shooting 🙁 I was so upset when the first battery started flashing the warning because I knew I didn’t have much left on the other ones. How could I forget to charge them?

Luckily I was able to squeeze just a couple of images at the very end of the battery life and came up with this image. I love the sunburst peaking through the blossoms. I think the flowers underneath that are the ones that I look at the most. They look as if they’re glowing.

My camera settings for this image is F22 at 1/125th of a second at ISO 400 with my Sony A7II and 16-35mm wide angle lens.

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.

I tried to avoid the Cherry Blossom festival this weekend. I knew there would be TONS of people in DC and I wanted to try to avoid most of the crowd. I have big plans of going to DC this week to shoot these amazing trees. So watch out for them.

In the meantime, I went to Meadowlark Botanical Gardens in Vienna, VA to practice my flower shots.

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