My trip report ALL DAYS 1 thru 6 - LOTS of pics

[AndrewWG]

O.K now you are making me nervous! I was really hoping this would be the TRIP to capture those fantastic fireworks, esp. with the new castle decorations.

Now please don't get me wrong here. Great fireworks shots are possible. But you must also remember that I am dealing with an impatient 8 yr old and an extended family of 12 that are all trying to do more than one thing at once. Here are my tips for fireworks. None of this is new to anyone who has been on here for awhile and read all the threads, but I am just reinforcing the knowledge. You MUST use a tripod. No questions on this one. Sure, you can get a good shot or two without it. I did get a couple good ones. Nothing great though. Also, you MUST stake out a spot before hand. You should expecially look for one that has NO street lights in front of you. These will be turned off during the show, but they will show up as a huge shadow in your pics. Not very nice to see. Those two key items were missing with my fireworks shots. I was forced to handhold the camera because I didn't stake out a spot early enough to set up the tripod and I had a street light in front of me that I didn't even realize was there. Of course the "cool" Dad that decided to pick his kid up on his shoulders half way through the show didn't help me much either, but there isn't much I could do about that. Another point would be that you have to be somehere right in front of the castle. I thought I had outsmarted the world one night when I went on a bridge between frontierland and adventureland. I had a good side view of the castle. I will get great fireworks shots right? NOPE! The fireworks are set off too far back and they ended up being to the left of the side of the castle by a large distance. All my shots that night stunk.

I haven't even really started post processing the fireworks shots yet, but here is a quick peek at what I mean by my shots being "good" but certainly not "great". I handheld for 1 second. That is a recipe for disaster in and of itself.

Notice that there is a tough balance of light between the relatively dark castle and the bright fireworks. If someone could tell me how to smooth that out in the future, that would be great. I didn't figure out the best setting there at all. I can't imagine a longer shutter than 1 second unless the aperture is much more closed than f8 or the fireworks would look all blown out. The castle would look better though. Am I missing something here? Also, there is the obvious out of focus castle due to my handheld 1 sec exposure.

 

[AndrewWG]

I am enjoying your report. Tell DD that she did a great job with her picture. I would also like to see more of her pictures. Looks like you two will have to go out on a few photo shoots together. Start teaching her now. Just think of what she could do down the road.

Oh you will see more of her fantastic work. She got a few shots that I just said "wow" to. Looking through a kids eyes is VERY interesting. I will start a thread about it if I can't find the one that was started a few months ago. I forget who started it. I think it was either Gdad or Yekcim. Not sure though. That gave me the idea to give DD a camera to play with while we were there. Her main "problem" is that she likes to ZOOM in on everything almost as far as it can go. This was extremely creative at times and disaster at times. She learned alot about photography on this trip I think.

 

[DizneyNutz]

You got some trails of the fireworks, esp. for handheld. Do they cut off the Ice lights on the castle during the fireworks? Thanks in advance!

 

[AndrewWG]

You got some trails of the fireworks, esp. for handheld. Do they cut off the Ice lights on the castle during the fireworks? Thanks in advance!

Yes they do shut off the ice lights for the fireworks, although you will see in my day 5 report, that they do turn some on later in the show just before the end and the result would be spectacular if photographed correctly. I'm counting on handicap18 or Steve's Girl to come through for me on that one! I have only one that I think with a little post processing could be real nice.

 

[AndrewWG]

Also, even handheld for 1 second, you can get trails. Here is the typical fireworks shot you see on here all the time. I just made 2 crucial mistakes. first it is handheld and second it is behind that street light. With a tripod in the center or as close to the edge of Main Street as possible, this shot would rock. Instead it just makes me plan my next trip...

 

[DizneyNutz]

Yes they do shut off the ice lights for the fireworks, although you will see in my day 5 report, that they do turn some on later in the show just before the end and the result would be spectacular if photographed correctly. I'm counting on handicap18 or Steve's Girl to come through for me on that one! I have only one that I think with a little post processing could be real nice.

it would be a shame to have to castle unlit during the whole show. Hopefullly I can stumble upon a decent photo op. and get a decent photo of them combined?

 

[poconoboatniks]

Great pix Andy! I wish that we had a trip planned.

 

[Groucho]

Hey Andy, really good trip report and lots of good shots, especially as you were still getting used to your camera. I think I can help you with one thing - and definitely don't feel bad, I had exactly the same issue on my last WDW trip!

I can tell you this for an example of the DSLR vs the S2IS: Me and DD8 were taking pics of a stork at AK. I took about 5 pics with the 30D and none of them came out good. She took one pic with the S2IS and it was fine. Here are the results:

Mine:

Hers: Edit- now that I look at the EXIF, this was with the older A85 camera, not the S2. Still a p&s though.

Quite a difference.

Looking at your exif data, you had your DSLR in spot metering mode, which means that it looks only at a very small spot to determine the proper exposure. In this case, it metered off the back of the white back of the bird, and you can see plenty of white feather detail there. Now, look at the back of the bird in the shot taken with the PnS - it's completely blown out, no white feather detail whatsoever.

This is a case of the camera doing what it's told rather than what you want it to do. (That's the thing about DSLRs, it's much harder to blame the camera itself!) You would have been much better off with center-weighted metering (or even having it meter the whole frame), this would pick up that most of the rest of the photo is much darker, and brighten up the exposure to match.

As I said, I had the same issue, I did many of my shots using spot metering last WDW trip and got a good number of surprisingly underexposed photos. I used center-weighted at DL and that went away, with nearly every photo having the exposure that I wanted, or at least pretty darn close.

 

[AndrewWG]

Hey Andy, really good trip report and lots of good shots, especially as you were still getting used to your camera. I think I can help you with one thing - and definitely don't feel bad, I had exactly the same issue on my last WDW trip!


Looking at your exif data, you had your DSLR in spot metering mode, which means that it looks only at a very small spot to determine the proper exposure. In this case, it metered off the back of the white back of the bird, and you can see plenty of white feather detail there. Now, look at the back of the bird in the shot taken with the PnS - it's completely blown out, no white feather detail whatsoever.

This is a case of the camera doing what it's told rather than what you want it to do. (That's the thing about DSLRs, it's much harder to blame the camera itself!) You would have been much better off with center-weighted metering (or even having it meter the whole frame), this would pick up that most of the rest of the photo is much darker, and brighten up the exposure to match.

As I said, I had the same issue, I did many of my shots using spot metering last WDW trip and got a good number of surprisingly underexposed photos. I used center-weighted at DL and that went away, with nearly every photo having the exposure that I wanted, or at least pretty darn close.

Groucho,

Thanks! And thanks for the input on the metering. I had thought that the spot was metering off the birds white feathers. I changed it to partial and got just about the same result. I'm guessing that the area that it partially metered was also of the white feathers. Oh well, like I said, I learned ALOT about that on this trip and I should do better next time. That's what this is all about afterall. Getting better by trial and error. I take what I have learned and try to apply it. I didn't even notice how much better the birds white feathers looked in my photo versus DD's photo as hers just looks better overall. Good eye, Groucho!

 

[wkrider]

This is a beautiful bird....great picture.

 

[jann1033]

nice photos andy, especially like the stunt show shot with the car straight on, a composition i haven't seen before

 

[dburg30]

If it were 8 more days, he would still be there. I believe that his whole trip was 6 days.

Kevin

ukcatfan- I believe they were talking about their own trip to Disney.

Maybe they added the "ticker" after you read it

Correct, I was talking about my own trip, seeing these pics getting me even more excited, if that was even possible! (and the ticker's been there for months now )

 

[AndrewWG]

Once again, thanks for the compliments. I tried so hard to do well on this trip. I really needed this trip for learning purposes and I think I came out of it with a much better understanding of how to take so many different styles of pics. I'm still not a pro, but I feel like a light is starting to go on in my head a bit at least!

Well, here is day 4's pics. The last bunch should be made into a flip book to see the castle lighting up. That would be cool. If I knew how to animate GIF's I'd convert them and do it. It might be cool. Anyways, here is the report.

Day 4:

Well by the time day 4 came around I don't know if anyone from our group wanted to hang out together! We all went our separate ways with me, DW and DD heading to AK once again. We wanted to do the trail behind Africa to see the gorillas and other animals. That was our main reason for going. No rides or anything. That trail is so cool to us tree hugger nature types. I focused my attention on many aspects of photography here. I started off with the 17-85mm lens but as soon as we crossed over into Africa, I changed to the 70-200mm. As I was going to primarily use this 70-200mm f2.8 lens, I knew that I wouldn't be taking too many shots of subjects that were closer to me. I must admit, that I was a bit surprised at how many opportunities I had even with this lens! So away I went shooting everything I saw once again, only this time I had much better light control since the lens is f2.8 throughout the range. Sure, some things were too close to photograph, but that was fine with me. For the most part, this adventure was going to be limited to birds and animals and water movement. I felt MUCH more in control of the camera at this point as I had worked out many of my errors of the past few days already. Although my shots weren't National Geographic by any means, I was pleased with most of my efforts.

After getting through the trail, we decided to eat at Rainforest Cafe for lunch. I've never given a glowing report of this restaurant, but it is "good" food with a cool atmosphere that DD really likes. No real complaints or compliments. I must say that the $100 bill was a bit surprising, but me and DW took the moment to endulge in a couple drinks which were way overpriced.

When we were done eating, we headed right over to MK for a stroll around and to wait for our Crystal Palace dinner with the rest of our group. As we were going to be in the park for the Christmas Party, we entered the park using our Christmas Party tickets and got our wristbands so we wouldn't have to do it later. That worked out great. Of course we had stuffed ourselves at Rainforest so this was a big mistake. The food was good, but we didn't make the most of the meal plan at this dinner. Pooh, Piglet, Tigger and Eeyore visited us and all the kids got pictures taken with them, but they are getting a bit old to be doing that and it shows in the pics that their enthusiasm isn't there anymore. Oh well, it had to happen someday I guess.

After dinner, we went out to watch the castle get lit up. It is always fun to watch and I got some decent sequence shots of it happening. Almost as soon as the castle was lit, they did the Wishes fireworks so that the people not attending the Christmas Party would be able to see them. My pics were lousy and I won't even show them here (can't anyways as I deleted them).

Once Wishes was done, we went on a couple rides and headed over to watch the Christmas parade. This was cool, but with the 50mm lens, I was way too close to get great shots. I haven't even PP'd them yet as I know they are not great by any means. You really need wide and fast for these parades and 50mm isn't wide enough. I did get some "ok" shots but overall I was not so happy with them. You will want to stand somewhere near a source of light like a streetlight or a store front or something since the floats were kind of dark and getting the characters faces was a bit tough. This parade STARTS in frontierland I believe and works it's way back towards the front of the park. Totally backwards from what we are used to.

Once the parade ended, we went over to the bridge between Frontierland and Adventureland and set up my tripod for the fireworks. Not a good idea at all. In fact, it was awful. The fireworks were to the left since I was viewing the castle from the side and all my photos were wasted. So that is two missed fireworks shows in one night. DD was real beat at this point and wanted nothing more than to go back to the room and sleep. We agreed that it had been a long day and called it a night. So we really lost out on a few hours of park activities, but had a good time while we were there and didn't mind. The moral of this story is that if you go to the Christmas Party, keep the kids in a relaxed environment without much walking around during the day. They will need the energy at night and you will too.

 

[dburg30]

Andy (may I call you that instead of Andrew? )

The thing that I really enjoy in your photos, and I dont know if you are doing it on purpose, or just happy accidents (I get those a lot) is your DOF (depth of focus).

The birds, the signs, the pond shot, all nice a deep, in focus from front to back.. But the little meerkat thing, the close up of the single bird, all have the nice bokeh. The subject nice and sharp, and the background nicely blurred. And the spider web, that was not face on, but angled, and in shadows, and you got it IMO pretty much dead on, nice focus from the front to the back of that, and it wouldve been easy to not hit that properly.. Very enjoyable shots to look at.

 

[AndrewWG]

Andy (may I call you that instead of Andrew? )

The thing that I really enjoy in your photos, and I dont know if you are doing it on purpose, or just happy accidents (I get those a lot) is your DOF (depth of focus).

The birds, the signs, the pond shot, all nice a deep, in focus from front to back.. But the little meerkat thing, the close up of the single bird, all have the nice bokeh. The subject nice and sharp, and the background nicely blurred. And the spider web, that was not face on, but angled, and in shadows, and you got it IMO pretty much dead on, nice focus from the front to the back of that, and it wouldve been easy to not hit that properly.. Very enjoyable shots to look at.

By all means call me Andy!

I would like to say that it is ALL skill that gets those shots to look like that. However, I have to admit that in most cases it is most likely a happy accident. I do know that using the 70-200mm lens at f2.8 and having it stretched to the max 200mm will give nice bokeh on most occasions, but I didn't exactly shoot these shots with that in mind. Like I said earlier in my trip report, I had very little time to take shots. There was not many times that I had the time to think about my shots too much. It caused me to think on the fly which was kind of nice in a way as I really had to learn and learn how to do things fast.

Actually, if I were really thinking about it, I would have tried to make the background of the spider web with a nice soft bokeh. Instead I just shot it and ran. I like it, but it would be much nicer with a soft background.


Glad you like the shots though! I have some REAL nice shots of the yellow bird that I am not posting just yet as I need to really take some time to post process them and make them look as nice as possible. The one I posted is ever so slightly out of focus on the bird. The reason for this is (like a newbie) I left the camera on ISO 1600 and forgot about it. This caused the pics to be grainy and when I put them through noiseware, it softened the image more than I had hoped. In the end though, I think it is a perfectly acceptable shot for my level of expertise.

 

[ukcatfan]

Correct, I was talking about my own trip, seeing these pics getting me even more excited, if that was even possible! (and the ticker's been there for months now )

Gotcha. I thought you were complementing his photos with the OMGs. For what it is worth, I do not pay attention to anyone's stuff, like tickers, in the signature area. I just read the actual posts. Have a nice first trip. Be warned though. It is addictive. I am past a point were I could even count. It is at least over 50, but couldn't tell you the exact number.

Kevin

 

[wdwmom2]

Love all your pictures Andrew!!! The castle is beautiful, love the slower shutter speeds with the waterfalls, and the bird on day 2, I think it it is a Chinese pheasant. My BIL had one he found walking around his property. He caught it and built a nice enclosure for it. It probably escaped for the local livestock auction that is nearby. They auction some pretty unusual things sometimes!!

I am hoping for either a 30D or 40D within the next year!!!

 

[scottny]

great shots as usual. I think i need to play with my camera before I go.

 

[DebºoºS]

Really enjoying your pics. The castle series is my fav so far. AK you really captured the feel there. Thanks for sharing them and looking forward to seeing more.

 

[dburg30]

The reason for this is (like a newbie) I left the camera on ISO 1600 and forgot about it.

Now, I for sure resemble that remark That or I've been wanting to use a wide open lens, and forgot to change it back, so the poor camera was shooting at the fastest shutter it could and just couldnt compensate for my dumb butt attack It's amazing how easily you get a total white out taking pictures of something in a bright sky at f/1.8