ANGELA B. PAN

Shot on the same puddle as this image. Even on a super cold, windy day there will always be people running around the tidal basin. I don’t know how they do it, especially in shorts. Anyways, I saw him running from 100 ft away. I immediately got into position where I thought I could get him and the Washington Monument in the same shot, squatted down low and hoped that it would work out. Luckily it did. This was probably about 20 minutes after the first image was shot though. Thats why this one is way more moodier and darker than the other one. I really like how the guy is almost silhouetted.

In other news, Andrew and I have booked our next trip! We’re going to be flying into Denver and road tripping it to Moab, UT and Rocky Mountain National Park. If you’ve been there, please let me know if you have any recommendations. Hotel, food, photography, whatever. Neither of us have ever been and I’m super excited to explore the mile high city and for our road trip. I know its going to be amazingly beautiful. One of my friends just came back from there and he was telling me that the altitude sickness is real while in Denver. After a quick amazon search, I’m not sure which medicine would be the best for us. So if you have any experience with that, please let me know as well. I never thought I’d get motion sickness but recently there have been times when I’m on a boat and will get pretty ill. I’d like to prevent anything like that from happening on our trip so I can maximize my photography time. Oh YEA!

This is going to be an awesome experience. I’ve always felt like I’ve only been to the coasts and edges of the United States but never anywhere in the middle. Really looking forward to the adventure 🙂

I know I’ve been posting a lot of the Tidal Basin recently, but thats where I’ve been going lately. Every time I go, I am hoping to see some cherry blossoms. More like wishing and praying. There are a few here and there that have bloomed but this particular morning that I went out the main attraction was definietly the cloudy sunrise. There was this amazing glow that was coming from the horizon that you just couldn’t ignore. However my favorite part of this image is being able to see the Jefferson statue right in the middle of the columns. I also really like the elongated reflection in the water.

Days like this one make me so happy to be a photographer living in the DC metro area. I feel really fortunate to be able to visit these monuments on a regular basis and to see the beauty in them in almost any kind of light. Not a lot of people have the same opportunities so I’m really grateful for mine. Even with all the early morning wake up calls and late nights, when I see a sunrise like this, it makes it completely worth it. But it’d be hard to pick which monument is my favorite monument to photograph. It’s like choosing which puppy is the cutest. They’re all so great and you love them all in such different ways. You can’t actually pick just one. (Was that a weird analogy? Comparing monuments to puppies?)

If you’re interested in knowing my settings on this image they were: f5.6 at 1/5 sec. I shot it on my Sony a7ii with my 16-35mm wide angle lens. If you’d like to know my settings for future images, just let me know in the comments below. If I remember, I’ll try to put them in my blog posts for you.

Last Friday was a crazy weather day. It’s been a long time since I’d seen anything like it. All through out the day mother nature switched from cloudy to sunny, rain to snow and even sunny with snow! It was bananas just sitting in front of the window and watching it all happen. Especially since the changes would happen every 10 minutes. So around 4pm I looked out again and saw some amazing clouds. I was really hoping for a great sunset. Usually when we have crazy weather days like this, the skies really light up.

I met up with my friend, Zack, to shoot the sunset from the Tidal Basin. Half sunset shooting, half scouting the cherry blossoms. Unfortunately the skies didn’t light up like I was expecting but I had a great time shooting from a low point of view. When I say low, I mean so low that I wasn’t even able to see what I was shooting. It was really a guessing game but one that worked in my favor. The water in the tidal basin was so choppy, there was no way that I would of been able get a reflection from it. Then we found this amazing puddle. It made me see the skies and the clouds in a totally different way.

Most of the time I’m out shooting by myself. So it’s great to meet up with people who have some of the same interest as I do. I had complimented Zack on a similar picture he took of a puddle and he was kind enough to show me how he did it. It made me think about all the other amazing puddles that I could of gotten a great shot out of but just walked away because I didn’t try it. Oh well. At least now I know.

Sometimes waking up early can be a struggle. The night before I took this, I was out to dinner with a few of my girlfriends. We were having so much fun catching up that we ended up staying out later than we usually would of so that meant I went to bed later than I usually do. Before we even went to bed, Andrew asked if I was going to wake up for sunrise. I said “I’m going to wake up and check the weather”. Well the next morning the app on my phone said it was mostly cloudy (usually great weather for photos) but I sooo did not want to wake up. I was tired and because the weather channel app also said it was 29 degrees out, I double did not want to wake up. After about 20 minutes of laying there and pretending like I was looking at important stuff on instagram and my email, I finally rolled out of bed, put on two pairs of pants, 3 top layers and off to the city I went. I decided to go to the US Capitol because I felt like I haven’t been there for a long time. With the inauguration last month, that place was pretty crowded with construction and people for about 3 months prior.

Once I arrived at the Capitol, it seemed like all the cold air went away. All the sleepiness went away. And I just felt pure excitement. The pink started to really show through the clouds and the air was so still that the reflection in the reflecting pool was perfect. I’m so glad I got there early because by the time I drove home the skies had turned grey. Overall, timing was perfect for the pink sunrise and the clouds were perfect for a nap afterwards 🙂

This is kind of a funny story. So lately when I’ll go to shoot the Lincoln Memorial at sunrise, I’ll park on the Arlington Memorial Bridge. It’s as close as you can get so early in the morning but you usually have to park kind of far down the bridge because there will always be cars that got there before you. So I’m walking along the bridge. I’ll stop and take some pictures of the water or something like that. You know, just takin’ my time and enjoying the morning views. Then at the very beginning of the bridge, I see this amazing puddle by the curb. I immediately crotched down to the sidewalk to to see if could get a better reflection of the Lincoln Memorial and see this beautiful shot of the memorial and Washington Monument all in one. Then I looked to make sure no cars were coming so I could stand in the street for a better view point. Luckily the parked cars were there to block me from the oncoming cars and I was able to capture the composition I was looking for. So I’m still crouching down and contorting my body in all these weird angles so that my tripod could balance on the sidewalk/road, I take the shot. I was really happy and so excited to have captured it because it was timed perfectly with oncoming cars providing these amazing light trails. But then when I was finally done, I stood up, turned around and looked in the parked car that was right behind me. There was someone sitting there the whole time! OMG He got a fabulous view of my butt the entire time. LOL. Who knows what he thought I was doing. But I can imagine the weird looks he was giving me the whole time while I was trying to set up.

Isn’t it weird how when you look at a picture and you can automatically remember when, where, how you were shooting it? I so remember this day like it was yesterday but it wasn’t. It was in June 2016. It had been a super hot and humid day. I remember specifically going out to the city because it was supposed to storm later that night and was I hoping that the sunset clouds would look cool. In real life they were beautiful, but it wasn’t until I looked at my LCD screen did I notice the kind of zig zag shape they were creating. It was even more noticeable in the reflection in the reflecting pool water. The clouds were moving kind of fast so I slapped on my Ice neutral density filter to slow down the shutter speed and it created this cool motion effect in the image. Also, there weren’t a lot of people out walking around so it made everything so clean and easy. The quote “If you can’t handle the heat, then get out of the kitchen” comes to mind because I also remember just sitting there with my tripod sweating, wishing I could just into the reflecting pool. All those memories from one 30 second exposure. Pretty cool.

In other news, Happy Valentines day!!! Hope you are spending this beautiful Tuesday with someone you love. Andrew and I are keepin’ it low key this year. After work, we’ll probably grab a pizza and watch some netflix. A heart shape pizza, obviously 🙂 I found the perfect card for him from Target over the weekend. It’s of this couple holding hands. On the woman’s shirt it says “Artsy” and on the man’s shirt it says “Fartsy”. LOL. Its like the card company knew our relationship. Just Kidding. Not really. HAHA.