ANGELA B. PAN

I took this image almost a year ago during Cherry Blossom season on that one crazy foggy morning we had. If you look closely enough, you can make out the cherry blossom trees in the background. But my focus for this image were on the birds that were flying in the foreground.

I know there has to be quite a few fish swimming around in the Tidal Basin. It’s not uncommon to see a couple of people out there fishing in the mornings, once in a while you’ll hear a random splash in the water and there’s always birds circling. 3 indications that in fact, there are fish in the tidal basin. So there are usually always a fair amount of birds that are on the water fishing. (What’s even cooler is when you can capture them all flying away together.) I thought it would be interesting to see if I could get a cool image of the birds and the fog, so for a good 10 minutes my focus went from photographing the flowers to the birds.

Then this one guy started flapping his wings like he was about to take off. Bird photography isn’t always my thing so I just took a few snap shots and kept it moving. It wasn’t until I got home and could view this image large on the computer screen that I noticed all the cool ripples it was creating. I also really like the reflection within those ripples. Overall I am just really happy with the way this turned out. I think it’s a pretty cool portrait of the scary flying creature about to take off.

And if you don’t know, I’m not a huge fan of birds. 

My settings for this image is F6.3 at 1/125the of a second at ISO 200 with my Sony A7II and 28-70mm lens.

On my quest to take more cherry blossom images this year, I thought I’d leave this one for you for the weekend. This image was taken in 2012.  This is what the cherry blossoms should look like. Beautiful puffy white clouds along these delicate, windy branches. A glorious morning only shared by those who didn’t mind waking up before the sun. Ripples along the water created by a bird, a duck or slight gust of wind.

LOL I can’t keep a straight face anymore. I tried to be poetic. I’ll stop now.

Yea… So I took this in 2012, I have another version of this here but this one is a brand new one. I did not process it until now. The first time I processed the original image it was in HDR. For some reason it created all these unnecessary lines and colors along the branches called chromatic aberration. Trust me it is a pain in the B-U-T-T to get rid of. Man. I think it took me almost 3 days of fixing before I could get it just right for a client to print. So this version is vertical and it’s a little bit of a different point of view. The colors are definietly not as saturated but I much prefer this version. What about you? Which one do you prefer? Here’s the link again to the first one. 

If you’re wondering, I stopped processing my images using HDR a while ago. I just realized I was spending all this unnecessary time processing and editing that I didn’t have to be. I am really enjoying my workflow now which is only photoshop. Nothing else. If you’re interested in learning more about it, check out my video here.

Have a great weekend everyone. May the flowers be dancing above your head like the cherry blossoms in 2012 were. LOL.

I’ve been home for a few days now. Florida was awesome! I’m excited to show you more images from my trip, but those may take a little while. They are images like I’ve never taken before and they are taking me a little while to work on them. So, they’ll have to wait. Am I building enough suspense?