ANGELA B. PAN

Thanks to Destination DC for inviting me to their Cherry Blossom Instameet this past Friday. The meet up time was set for 7am but sunrise is around 6:45 so I decided to go a little bit early to try to capture some images before I saw my friends. I arrived at the National Mall around 6am and headed straight towards the monument. I have been keeping an eye on the to the cherry blossoms around there for a little while and they were looking pretty good. And like I said in my last post, I really want to try to go to different places to capture them than the Tidal Basin. Well the blossoms did not disappoint! Even in the middle of darkness, you can see how plumpy they were looking. Yes, plumpy is a word in my dictionary. LOL.

But I didn’t bring my tripod because I didn’t want to have to hold it for the instameet. So in order to capture this image I took my backpack off and placed it on the ground. I still had my 28-70mm in there so I used it as a way to prop up the camera to shoot up from the ground. Unfortunately I didn’t notice I placed my backpack on a big patch of dirt and for the  rest of the morning I had dirt all over my back. LOL it was dark! So don’t do that if you’re planning on using your own backpack as a tripod. LOL. This was my first attempt but also my favorite. I love how the cherry blossom trees balance each other but there’s so much space in between.

Thanks again to Destination DC and the National Cherry Blossom Festival for hosting the event. And a special shout out to Stellas Popkern for the delicious popcorn. The black truffle with sea salt was so different but so good.

My camera settings for this image is F5.0 at 2.5 seconds and ISO 250 with my Sony A7II and 16-35mm wide angle lens.

So the cherry blossoms are not the only flowers that you will see by the Tidal Basin. Just to the other side of the Paddle Boat Parking lot will you find the Floral Library. It’s easy to walk right past it, but it’s one of my favorite places to be. I remember being a young girl and my mom would take us to the Tidal Basin to just take pictures in front of all the flowers. Photo evidence #1. LOL. Believe me, if you could see all the photos we have in our albums they all did not turn out as cute as this one did. HAHAHA

I took this image last year when they had some beautiful yellow daffodils. The Floral Library pretty much has something beautiful blooming all year around except for winter. My favorite way to capture these flowers is by getting down real low so that you are sitting in the grass and your camera is propped up. Basically it is resting on the dirt. The point is to get down that low to make it seem like the flowers are as big as the background and in this case, the Washington Monument. I love the play on perspective and it makes your viewer look at the image for a little bit longer so the can figure out what’s actually going on. But I think my favorite part of the image is that one daffodil facing the Washington Monument and it almost looks like it’s kissing it 🙂 Or is that just my imagination?

My camera settings for this image is F7.1 at 1/60th of a second and ISO 320 with my Sony A7II and 16-35mm wide angle lens. Obviously this wasn’t taken with a tripod only because I can’t find one that will go that low. Do you guys have any recommendations?

I hope you don’t mind but there are going to be a lot of flowers on my blog from now til about June. LOL. The cherry blossoms are starting to look real nice around the city and I’m really looking forward to getting out there and shooting them. For now, I’m enjoying all the other flowers that are popping up. These flowers are actually the same ones as the ones I captured in the snow. Turns out they weren’t cherry blossoms after all. LOL they look so different covered in all that cold white stuff.

As I was out shooting this, I was thinking to myself how nice and peaceful it was. It’s probably because I was just doing what I love, with my ear phones in listening to my favorite music and just enjoying the early morning air. There weren’t a lot of people around so I felt so free to try different compositions and ideas with my images. Thats when it came to me. I have a new goal for this year’s cherry blossom season. I want to capture the cherry blossoms in other places around the city other than the Tidal Basin. Don’t get me wrong though. I’ll still be down by the water and monuments, I just want to spend that extra time in other places too.

If you have not seen this already, the US Capitol came out with a map showing exactly where cherry blossoms are blossoming around the grounds. It inspired me to further research other places. I have a couple in mind already but if you know of any other places where there’s some good cherry blossoms, please let me know!

My camera settings for this image is F9 at 1/8th of a second and ISO 500 with my Sony A7II 28-70mm lens.

You know how I always say that the Enid A Haupt garden is my favorite place to see Magnolia trees in Washington DC? Well, I know my second favorite place now. It’s Rawlins Park located in Foggy Bottom and pretty close to the White House. It was my first time visiting this park but I drive past it all the time. I never really paid any attention to it until my friend, Zack told me about it. Holy cow, how long have I been missing out on this magical place? I love how the whole park is lined with Magnolia trees.

So on a very grey morning, my friend, Laurie and I went to photograph the park. It’s not very big so we managed to walk around and captured it all within 20 minutes or so. The park has been really blossoming so tons of other photographers in the area have been shooting it too. In order to find a unique perspective, I just stuck to what I knew. Get low and always look behind you. I love the leading lines the park bench create to look down the row of benches and even the arches the the Magnolia trees create. The fun added bonus was that there were these random ducks just walking around. HAHA. This little guy had an injured foot unfortunately. I really wished there was something I could have done to help him.

So Enid A Haupt is my favorite just because they have so many more trees but Rawlins Park is just as beautiful but a little bit smaller. To be honest though, there will probably be less people wondering around at Rawlins Park than Enid A Haupt.

My camera settings for this image is F9 at 1/20th of a second at ISO 160 with my Sony A7II and 16-35mm wide angle lens.

The cherry blossoms haven’t bloomed this year. I’m hoping they’ll be out at this time next week.

So this is an image I took last year around this same time. I have tried working on this image several times in the past year but I could never get it right. It’s really different from other images I create because of the lighting. I don’t have much practice with artificial lighting, especially outdoors like that. So whenever I edited it, the colors would look funny and didn’t like it. I’m so happy with the way this one turned out. It’s exactly what I had envisioned from the very beginning. Finally.

It was that same super foggy day that I took this image and this one. This just happens to be the very first image I took that whole morning. The fog had not fully settle in yet so you can see how it’s covering half of the Washington Monument. Little did I know that later on in the morning the entire monument would be covered. So cool!

And little did I know, I would drop my tripod in the Tidal Basin that day too. *face palm* #neverforget.

Anyways, hope you all have a great weekend. I am about to send out my monthly newsletter on Sunday the 1st so if you aren’t subscribed, please do so here. You won’t want to miss out on free calendar downloads, an updated cherry blossom guide and so much more! And if you do use the free wallpapers, screen shot them and send them to me! I would love to see it!

The settings for this image is F8 at 2.5 seconds and ISO 160 with my Sony A7II and 16-35mm wide angle lens on a tripod.

Yesterday’s sunrise was amazing. I checked my weather app the night before and it looked very promising. So I was excited to get out to the Tidal Basin, shoot sunrise and check on the status of the cherry blossoms.

You can see in this image that they are budding. I may have seen one or two trees that had a couple of blossoms on them but for the most part they looked like this. They definietly won’t be blooming this week. Hopefully by the end of next week. However the color in the sky and the cherry blossoms were not my main focus once I arrived. It was all the flooding that was on the sidewalks! There was so much water everywhere. A lot of the southern part of the Tidal Basin, close to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, had large puddles and some were so big that they were impassable. It had got to the point where I really regretted my decision of wearing sneakers instead of rain boots. It made the grass all muddy and overall a really swampy situation.

I’ve seen the Tidal Basin flood before, but there had always been a reason. This day for example was right after we had a huge thunderstorm so obviously it was flooded. This day was crazy foggy and there was a lot of moisture in the air so I’m assuming that’s why it flooded. But we haven’t had any rain or snow in almost a week. There really is no reason why the sidewalks should have been flooded like they were. It’s bananas.

So if you’re like me and want to do something about it, check out the Trust for the National Mall’s website so we can help protect the Tidal Basin and Cherry Blossoms.

The camera settings for this image is F5.6 at 1/40th of a second and ISO 500 with my Sony A7II and 16-35mm wide angle lens.