ANGELA B. PAN

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.

From what I heard last week, today has been the day I’ve been waiting for all winter. If all goes well and all the wind and cold air that we had over the weekend didn’t effect anything then the Magnolias will start to peak today. Cash me ousside.

My favorite Magnolia trees are the ones at the Enid A Haupt Garden behind the Smithsonian Castle on the National Mall, but you can really find them all over the city. This image was taken at the George Mason Memorial facing the Washington Monument adjacent to the Tidal Basin. To be honest, spring time is really the only time that I spend time at this memorial. It’s a pretty small memorial compared to the others but the landscaping around it is fantastic. Its a great place to just sit on the bench and listen to the birds chirp.

So I’m really looking forward to spending more time here as spring goes on. Actually, that’s an understatement. I think the word really is anxious. I’m really anxious to spend more outside in general. I still have the list I created last year of all the places that I want to photograph. Like spending more time at Dumberton Oaks, the National Arboretum, Enid A Haupt Garden, so many! OMG I can’t wait. So see ya later cold weather. Time to go. Make way for the cherry blossoms. What’s up with March being so cold? 

My camera settings for this image is F9 at 1/60th of a second and ISO 200 with my Sony A7II and 28-70mm lens handheld.

So it’s been one week since I decided to delete instagram off my phone. To be honest, I never expected all the kind comments and emails. I appreciate it sooo so much. You have no idea. Everyone has been extra supportive but I have decided that Ill download Instagram again for the Cherry Blossoms at the latest. Don’t get me wrong though out of the 7 sunrises that have happened since my instabreak, I’ve gone out to shoot 4 times. So even though I’m not documenting it all on social media, I’m still at it as much as I can.

What have I learned from the break? I spend entirely too much time staring at my phone! I don’t need to catch up with my friends by seeing what they’re doing on the internet. I can simply call them or text them and find out what’s been going on straight from the horse’s mouth and its so much better that way. I’ve also learned to be more present. At times I’ll be walking around and think to myself, what should my next instastory be? or this would be great for an instastory. This past weekend while I was walking around I thought, wow that tree is beautiful, I’m just going to take a picture of it because I like it. No one else has to see it, but me.

Now I’m not sure if this has any correlation or not, but I’m also taking the time to learn more too. I’ve been consuming so many youtube videos, listening to audiobooks and just reading in general. I’ve been learning a lot about mindset, wealth and photoshop tutorials. It’s been great!

Overall, I am so grateful for the break. It was definietly a recharge and I feel more inspired than ever. I do miss instagram and I’ll be honest, I have checked it out once or twice on my desktop computer which I justified by saying, it’s not really the same LOL. So this is just a thank you so much for all your support. I’ll be back soon and probably by the end of the week! As of now, I’m not in a rush. Instagram will always be there 🙂

PS that tree I was talking about was a cherry blossom tree in Alexandria, VA. They’re starting to pop up in different places and I’m so excited!

My camera settings for this image is F8 at 1/8th of a second at ISO 500 with my Sony A7II and 16-35mm wide angle len handheld.

Today is the day! Today is the day that the National Mall NPS will announce their predicted peak bloom date for the cherry blossoms. I can’t wait. I’ve been on twitter everyday this week checking out what they say and what Capital Weather Gang has to say about the weather we’ve been having and how they’d effect the Cherry trees. As a side note, I’m pretty sure I just gained 10 cool points from that last statement. LOL. As of now, I’m just excited for the big announcement!

PS. Today is also the day that my March monthly newsletter goes out. If you haven’t already, make sure to sign up. I have a couple of really exciting announcements of my own that I’ll be announcing on the newsletter first!

Ok, now back to the image on this blog post. This was taken last year, early morning on a particularly beautiful day. It was the day after it rained and it created these amazing puddles all along the Tidal Basin sidewalks. It also rained so hard that there were flower petals all over the place and it felt like you were walking in a wet wonderland of pink. I had my headphones in, rain boots on, and I was having a blast walking around capturing the beautiful trees. It was just by accident that I captured the airplane flying by but I think it makes it a little more interesting to see. I also remember having to wait a little while for this area to clear because there was a big group of people standing underneath the trees taking pictures. It was well worth it because I love the way it turned out. However if you look closely enough, you will still see one person there still taking pictures. At least she’s a little camouflaged though. HAHA.

The settings for this image is F18 at 1/50th of a second at ISO 400 with my Sony A7II and 16-35mm wide angle lens.

One crazy cold morning I met up with my friend, Albert to shoot the sunrise. I remember the day before I heard on the radio that we were expecting a lot of fog and obviously I got really excited and told Albert about it. The weather can be so finicky because I woke up the next morning to one of the clearest skies ever! I’m so sorry Albert I made you get out of bed so early in the morning! Plus it was crazy cold and windy. It was probably one of the shortest sunrise sessions I’ve ever had. 20 minutes and I was back in my car.

But as we were about to leave, I noticed the beautiful light that was coming from the front of the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial. I asked Albert to stand right at the light ray and I love the way that this turned out. It’s so simple with the little pop of “warm” light. But I think my favorite part is the overall cool-ness to the image. I love how blue and cold it feels because that’s exactly what it felt like being there. Remember how I was saying this is a composition I wanted to keep on working on? Click here to read my previous post about the MLK Jr Memorial. 

To be honest though it’s not exactly what I had intended from the original post. It’s a little bit closer to what I had in mind and I’m still very happy with it. I’m going to keep at it until I get it exactly how I envision it.

Did I mention it was crazy cold that morning? LOL.

The camera settings for this image is F7.1 at 1/125th of a second at ISO 125 with my Sony A7II and 16-35mm wide angle lens.

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.