This first shot is my oldest son, who likes to get up early. He's sitting around the camp playing with his new iPod Touch waiting for his mother to get breakfast ready.
1/25s, f/1.8, ISO 3200, 50mm, -1 EV
Our main park for the day was the Disney Hollywood Studios. Whatever happened to the MGM name?
We'd been warned in advance that we needed to hit Toy Story Midway Mania as quickly as possible. We raced there right after opening. We got fast passes and went on the ride first thing.
A big part of the success of our trip came from exploiting the Fast Pass system as much as possible. A few key facts aren't universally understood. First, when you get a Fast Pass, it gives a time range. You can ignore the return time. We returned several hours after the return time and were never questioned about it. So if your Fast Pass says that you can ride between 10:00 AM and 11:00 AM, it really means that you can ride any time after 10:00 AM. The next trick is that you can get another Fast Pass as soon as your first Fast Pass's starting time arrives. So using the example above, you could get another Fast Pass at 10:00 AM, even if you haven't used the first one. Our technique was to collect Fast Passes all morning and start using them in the afternoon when it was hotter and we were less interested in waiting in line. To make this as optimal as possible, we tried to get the Fast Passes with the longest delay between acquisition and first use time first and get the less important Fast Passes later. If you try to get a Midway Mania Fast Pass at 10:00 AM, it will be the last Fast Pass you'll get until 4:00 PM.
The new ride is a lot of fun. It's similar in style to the Buzz Lightyear ride in the Magic Kingdom. It heavily rewards people that can sustain a high firing rate. Surprisingly, my younger son beat his bigger brother every time.
Here's a shot you won't see unless you are an early morning person - empty queue space. 1/24s, f/4.0, ISO 2000, 35mm
1/40s, f/4.0, ISO 500, 35mm
I don't have any pictures from the ride itself. It's a mostly images on 3D screens, so it wouldn't photograph well. Also, I was busy insuring that I outscored my wife and kids, so I didn't have time to fiddle with my camera gear. My typical score was in the 150,000 to 180,000 range. I do have some shots on later days of the ride cars if you are curious as to what they look like. The one thing that I didn't like about the ride is that our group of four was always in one car. That meant that two of us were behind the other two and couldn't really interact on the ride.
The Tower of Terror is a favorite for everyone in our family. I love the theming. We always avoided waiting in long lines, but I was tempted to go when the lines were longer just so that I'd have more time to shoot the exterior gardens.
1/100s, f/4, ISO 500, 105mm
I took more interior shots this time. Here are two different interprations of a display case in the waiting area. The first focuses on it more as a display case and the other focuses more on the contents. I also used different white balances on the two because I liked the different feels they gave.
1/20s, f/4.0, ISO 2500, 24mm
1/25s, f/4, ISO 2000, 24mm
You'll notice that a lot of shots are at f/4. I opted to use the Canon 24-105 f/4 IS lens as my main walk-around lens. I decided that the extra range, lighter weight, and IS were more valuable to me than the extra speed of the 24-70 f/2.8. At home, I almost always make the other choice. This was my first extensive use of the 24-105. Overall, I like the lens, but it does have nasty barrel distortion at the wide end.
I don't know what this stuff is supposed to be. It's from the shelf in the TV room on the ride.
1/10s, f/4, ISO 6400, 105mm
I already have decent shots of the ghosts from prior trips, but I think this was my first with the lightning/eletricity.
1/40s, f4, ISO 6400, 85mm
We tried to sneak my 7 year old (who is 46" tall) onto the Rockin' Roller Coaster. We even went so far as to buy him 2" tall sandals. Sadly, they were noticed on the way in and he wasn't allowed to ride. If you
really, really want to get Fast Pass aggressive and you have a too small child, you can use this trick to exploit the system. To enable child swapping, they gave us a Fast Pass good for up to three people when they rejected my younger son. We could have bailed out of line and then used the Fast Pass instead. That seemed a little to exploitive for my relatively low standards, so we didn't go that route. My older son and wife dutifully waited in line while my younger son and I had some snacks.
The Great Movie Ride is a good example of a relatively bright "dark" ride. It's much easier to shoot than PotC, HM, or PP. It seems like just about everyone has at least one shot of John Wayne from the ride. I shot this one at ISO 6400, which was overkill. It would have made more sense to use a 1/30s shutter speed at ISO 1600. There were other, dark areas on the ride that I wanted to shoot at ISO 6400 and I didn't bother switching.
1/125s, f/4.0, ISO 6400, 75mm
1/15s, f/2.8, ISO 3200, 200mm
1/125s, f/4.0, ISO 6400, 75mm
You'll notice that, despite my camera having an ISO 12,800 and 25,600 mode, I never use them. In my experience a shot taken at ISO 12,800 looks identical to one taken at ISO 6,400 with a -1 exposure compensation and then brightened in post production. I see no downside to shooting at 6,400 -1 rather than 12,800 and the upside is that I have more headroom before I blow out highlights. My friend with a Nikon D3 reports the same appears to be true with his camera as well.
The kids love to play in the Honey I Shrunk the Playground area. It's a fun place, but it is awful for photography.
I wonder if I can pass this off as a "macro" shot? 1/125, f/3.5, ISO 100, 78mm
Here's a shot of me ant wrangling. We have real ants that are almost this big back in Texas. They aren't scary. It's the tiny little fire ants that you learn to watch out for. You can see my equipment belt in this picture. It was my primary means for carrying gear in the park. I usually wore one or two lens pouches and one or two pouches for random gear (filters, phones, etc). 1/125s, f/4, ISO 100, 70mm
You see ISO levels all across the map in my shots. I usually left the camera on auto ISO. In fact, I probably took half or more of my shots in Program mode. I often overrode the settings that it picked, but it was good for when I was shooting on the run and not that concerned.
Much to my kid's regret, I love the Voyage of the Little Mermaid show. I think it is a great mutli-media show. The lighting is great for stage effects but not for photography. I've yet to walk away with pictures that I'm excited about, but I still shoot it anyway.
Incidentally, I started shooting sign pictures because I thought they would be useful for my slideshows (introducing new areas). Tipped off by a scrapbooker, I posted a thread over in the scrapbook forum filled with sign pictures. The people over there loved them. If you've got pictures that scrapbookers would like, I encourage you to stop by that forum and share them. I plan to start a pictures from dark rides thread over there soon to help those scrappers without dark ride capable gear fill those holes in their books.
1/50s, f/2.8, ISO 6400, 160mm
Ariel is the prettiest of the Disney princesses. 1/160s, f/4.0, ISO 1600, 70mm
I love the laser/fog affect. 1/20s, f/2.8, ISO 3200, 95mm
. They took us to eat at Grotto - ever been there? I'm sure you have, it was delicious. Their last name is Shirah, what are the odds you know them? They have 2 boys that look to be about the age of yours.
It reminds me of that explanation of time travel that Doc Brown explains to Marty McFly in Back to the Future about "skipping over that minute to arrive at this minute in time."
