Spectacular Cherry Blossom Year

April 15, 2014

This was the first year that I was successfully able to make it out to the Jefferson Memorial and Tidal Basin before sunrise to take pictures of the cherry blossoms. Other years, I had silly mishaps like forgetting my batteries or miss judging the sunrise time. With a fellow photographer we were able to make it out to the basin by 5:30 AM and as we found so did a few dozen of other avid photographers and camera crews. It was a nice sight to see the cherry blossom tree lit up by a panel of LED video lights. It illuminated the blossoms in a dreamy lavender pink hue. And it was funny to see how everyone was trying to position themselves to get an angle of the Jefferson Memorial and the lit blossoms.

It is great to experience the stillness of the morning before too much bustle was going to descend on the basin.

The crowds started to build up as the sun rose making it difficult to find a spot that you can frame the blossom and/or the memorials in a fresh perspective. Luckily I packed my Lensbaby fisheye lens hoping to score a novel composition.

As the sun quickly brightened the DC skyline edging over the horizon, the warm glow intensified the pinks in blossoms. It is breath taking to get to stand under the grove of trees as the sun rose.

As we walked around past the FDR Memorial and the Martin Luther King Memorials, my favorite spots around the basin are where the branches droops over the basin. By this time the full morning daylight bathed the sky and the snowy pink-white blossoms can be seen. Since this was the first day of the peak blossoms, the petals were fully intact and the basin perfectly mirrored the blossoms leaning into it from overhead.

And sometimes I had to get into awkward positions (like laying flat on my back as people walked around me) to photograph these beautiful trees.

And of course, I always have to have an image of the delightful tiny blossoms that bloom off of the main tree trunk. It just seem so determined to bloom even if it wasn't apart of a branch and the cluster of blossoms.

On a morning like that Thursday, the back drop of the perfectly clear blue skies was more than we can ask for as image makers. The pale pinks harmoniously dancing to the morning breeze.

Keywords: Jefferson Memorial, cherry blossoms, dc, tidal basin