Tips and Examples

[MarkBarbieri]

How about a thread demonstrating some tips for photos at WDW along with examples. It'd be a nice reference for people about to go. I'll get it started with a few.

Shooting Kids on Rides

Set up your camera so that you get a relatively high shutter speed because you won't be able to hold it steady. This may mean increasing the ISO or opening the aperture wider (lower f-stop number).

Zoom out pretty wide since you will probably have trouble aiming it. You can always crop it down later, but you can't add in something that you missed.

Take a bunch of shots and hope that one of them works.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

Shoot Your People

Don't get so hung up on shooting the beautiful sites and shows. Make sure that you take plenty of shots of your kids, spouses, friends, etc. Don't just take those shots where everyone is posed in front of the castle either; get shots of people watching shows, riding rides, etc.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

Set the Scene

Take scene setting shots. These shots tell people what the following pictures will be about. For example, here is a shot that tells you that the following shots will be about Fantasmic. You can use this technique on signs for rides and shows. You can also take distance shots of buildings and pavilions. You want your pictures to tell a story about your trip, so make sure that you have some that help set the scene.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

Don't Forget the Little Things

Take pictures of the little things that were special on your trip. Not every picture has to be of people and places. How about a shot of that great meal that you are being served? Or maybe a special pin you traded for. Or perhaps a hidden mickey.

 

[jann1033]

great idea for a thread mark...maybe this could be added to by others and become a sticky?

 

[MarkBarbieri]

Everyone makes mistakes, throw them away

One of my pet peeves is someone showing me their vacation photos without them culling the junk first. Everyone takes bad pictures. Throw them away. Why is that so hard for some people? About 5% of my shots made it into my slideshows. I only kept about 25% of my shots.

Does anyone really need to see something like this?

Extra points for anyone that can guess what it was from.

 

[WDW Poly Princess]

Great tips so far!

For some reason, the phrase "shooting kids on rides" cracked me up. "If you kids don't sit down and shut up back there, I'll shoot ya! I learned how on the internets!"

Looking forward to more tips!

 

[jann1033]

Everyone makes mistakes, throw them away

One of my pet peeves is someone showing me their vacation photos without them culling the junk first. Everyone takes bad pictures. Throw them away. Why is that so hard for some people? About 5% of my shots made it into my slideshows. I only kept about 25% of my shots.

Does anyone really need to see something like this?

Extra points for anyone that can guess what it was from.

fireworks reflected in a window?????

 

[MarkBarbieri]

fireworks reflected in a window?????

No. It was from the Tower of Terror. For grins, I tried taking pictures of the "star field" just before the doors open. There wasn't enough light, so the shutter stayed open. So what you see are the stars and then the outline of the doors opening. I have no clue what the pink and blue squiggles are. Maybe the ghost of socks that the guests lost in the laundry at the hotel.

 

[extreme8]

How about this;
Even less than ideal lighting situations can hold interesting photo ops.
Most of us shoot digital and 1's and 0's are free. If you see somthing make your best guess at exposure and fire off a couple of frames, maybe you'll get lucky.
Even if it isn't perfect it's better to have somthing tha to miss that once in a lifetime shot.

 

[Groucho]

Nice idea. I was thinking of taking a few "example" or at least "test" shots on my trip - a few examples being the same photo taken with different apertures to demonstrate DoF, or different shutter speeds for moving objects, etc.

Since you posted one of the BTMR photos, I had a question. Some of them seem to have some pretty extreme... I'm not even sure if it qualifies as noise or grain, it's almost like the colors were converted to 256 at some point. An example is 117449839-O.jpg, where the skin tones have become pretty mottled. The ISO is somewhat high but not skyhigh (1000), it's F11, and a 1/500 second shutter - is the ISO actually causing that? Or was there something that happened in post-processing? Obviously these are relatively small for such a large photo (1.5m for 3504x2336) so perhaps the JPG compression took a toll on the image.

It's not as noticable, of course, when shrunk down, but still visible.

Not to second-guess your choices, but I suspect that it could have gone down to ISO400 and a wider aperture, you could have still gotten an acceptable fast shutter speed to stop the action?

Hopefully I'm not overstepping my bounds here, just trying to expand my knowledge. I talk a good game but I was out of serious photography for a while and am still filling in gaps in what I know and can sometimes overlook things.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

I suspect that it could have gone down to ISO400 and a wider aperture, you could have still gotten an acceptable fast shutter speed to stop the action?

That shot was taken on the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. I wanted to set the camera to a high enough ISO (in this case 1000) so that I would get both high shutter speeds and large DOF without having to reconsider anything. It's really hard to fine tune your settings while riding a rollercoaster. It's hard enough dangling several pounds worth of camera gear without smacking yourself or your seatmate.

In good lighting, the noise isn't that much of an issue. The problem is when, like it the photo you cited, the subject is in the shadows. In that case the news does get pretty nasty.

It's all about compromises. In hindsight, given how little of the ride was in the dark and how bright the day was, I would probably have set the ISO to 640. If it was at a Six Flags, I probably would have also dropped the f-stop down to f/4 and gone with an even lower ISO. As it was, I wanted to have pretty good dof to show the context of the ride along with the passengers.

These would be good circumstances for the auto-ISO feature on the new Pentax. I'd really like to be able to say something like keep a minimum shutter speed of /500, try to keep a minimum f-stop of f/8.0, and use the lowest ISO that gets you there.

 

[Groucho]

BTMR is tricky as you probably need to decide ahead of time if you're going to take a picture inside or outside, like you said. Same with Splash Mountain, Expedition Everest, etc. I'm hoping for some decent Splash Mt pics but it's only open one day when we're there so I'm not sure how often I'll be able to ride it! I'm also planning on using the Zenitar for most photos like that, which means full manual mode... hopefully things will work like I'm hoping they do. For most things, I'm expecting that I'll be able to get a lot better pictures on day 9 or 10 than day 1 or 2. If so, hey, at least the before/afters will be useful for a thread like this.

I hear you about changing settings when on a ride, though - on our last trip, I was trying to use my PnS's movie mode on Primeval Whirl after taking a still photo on the beginning hill - but I hit the wrong thing and spent most of the ride wrestling with it and finally got about three seconds of video at the end. Argh!

 

[Charade]

How about this;
Even less than ideal lighting situations can hold interesting photo ops.

I agree. Even though this is technically a poor image, I still like it.

 

[Charade]

Be ever prepared. You never know what you might miss.

 

[extreme8]

These would be good circumstances for the auto-ISO feature on the new Pentax. I'd really like to be able to say something like keep a minimum shutter speed of /500, try to keep a minimum f-stop of f/8.0, and use the lowest ISO that gets you there.

The Nikon D200 has that cool auto-ISO ability as well. Price is a bit above the Pentax, but still....

..you probably need to decide ahead of time if you're going to take a picture inside or outside..

I agree that it's best to make your decisions and change your settings before the ride starts, but sometimes you can get lucky.
Just before I took this one I was spinning dials and making menu changes like a crazy man!

 

[manning]

Be ever prepared. You never know what you might miss.

Someone asked the upside down pilot why he flies like that. The answer was when your lost it's the easy way of getting your bearing as you get a full view of the ground.

 

[Steve's Girl]

The Nikon D200 has that cool auto-ISO ability as well. Price is a bit above the Pentax, but still....

The D80 has this as well. Sure has come in handy a few times when I forgot to adjust my settings. This feature was high on my list of determining factors when choosing my camera.

 

[Groucho]

I don't think you folks are understanding what Mark means by Auto ISO on the K10D.

The K10D has three types of ISO functionality that the D80 and D200 lack (and I think virtually all DSLRs other than the K10D lack):
1. The Auto ISO can be configured for both maximum and minimum ISO

2. There's a Sensitivity Priority (Sv) mode that works like Aperture Priority and Shutter Priority, where you set the ISO with the rear dial.

3. There's a Shutter and Aperture Priority (TAv) mode where you use the rear dial to select aperture and the front dial to select shutter speed, leaving the camera to pick the ISO.

These are in addition to the Hyper-program mode which is normal program mode but jumps into Av or Tv if you fiddle with the front/rear dials, and hitting the green button resets it into normal program mode. Sounds very handy and would be ideal for making settings quickly, like on a ride. There's also a user mode that lets you save your favorite setting.

The D80 has Auto/P/S/A/M plus some scene modes, and the D200 has P/S/A/M.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong (I'm sure you will ) but that's the way it looks from looking at the reviews of all three.

 

[ukcatfan]

I don't think you folks are understanding what Mark means by Auto ISO on the K10D.

The K10D has three types of ISO functionality that the D80 and D200 lack (and I think virtually all DSLRs other than the K10D lack):
1. The Auto ISO can be configured for both maximum and minimum ISO

The K100D has the auto ISO ranges also. I typically have it set to 200-400, but adjust it to 200-800 if it is a darker situation. So far, I have kept 1600 & 3200 out of the auto range and select them manually when needed. It also has an ISO warning in the viewfinder that you can set to any level. It would have been better to have the actual ISO show there, but I guess we can't have everything.

Kevin