What's in a title anyway? How about 1300 pictures? 4/15/11-> Bonus Section pt1 & 2

[Stefy]

Oh Rob reading along with you made me really sad it was your last day. The last day Disney Blues is definitely not the best day of the trip. But you spent it very well in Epcot, soaking it all in and fantastic way to end it with Soarin'

Thank you so much for sharing your trip and awesome photos with us. Can't wait for the next one

 

[NateNLogansDad]

Oh Rob reading along with you made me really sad it was your last day. The last day Disney Blues is definitely not the best day of the trip. But you spent it very well in Epcot, soaking it all in and fantastic way to end it with Soarin'

Thank you so much for sharing your trip and awesome photos with us. Can't wait for the next one

That's how I was when I read along with you and Dave. Who knows when my next one will be I'm sure it'll pale in comparison to yours. I'm really looking forward to it!!!

 

[NateNLogansDad]

Well as promised, there will be a bonus section! Actually, more than one. The first I’d like to call A Kids World. I sent the boys with my little camera to take some pictures. Tina used it a few times to get some picture with both Nate and Logan in them at the same time. If you remember (a few years ago when I first started this report) I had dropped the three of them off at he airport a day earlier than when I went down. Here’s a few taken during their bonding time back at Caribbean Beach ……

This is when Logan takes over. He’s my little shutter bug. He loves to take pictures, look at them on the LCD, and then delete them. I guess that’s why there wasn’t any on the card for 11/13. These are from after we transferred over to the Beach Club…..

Taken by Nate. I think it might be time to start introducing him to the White Balance feature.

 

[NateNLogansDad]

At the Coral Reef….

Logan’s artsy fartsy Self Portrait…..

Brandon and Austin…

Over at Hollywood Studios…he’s got a pretty steady hand!

Logan and me taken by Nate

I’m pretty sure Logan may have deleted the rest. So that’s a little taste of Disney through a child’s eye. Hope you enjoyed that!



There will be one more bonus section of pictures I took one night when I went out for a walk around the Beach Club after midnight. I’m going to try to post that up tonight or tomorrow.

 

[Purpleblanket]

I've really enjoyed following along on your TR!
You've done a great job entertaining us!!
And you took great photos!

Thanks again!

Debbie

 

[NateNLogansDad]

I've really enjoyed following along on your TR!
You've done a great job entertaining us!!
And you took great photos!

Thanks again!

Debbie

I have the next installment done and ready to go but I'm not near my computer at the moment. Hopefully if things go well, I'll be all wrapped up in another hour and a half and this report will be put to rest!

 

[NateNLogansDad]

So, here’s my bonus offering. All week long I had talked about going out for a walk with my tripod. All week long after lugging the stroller on and of buses with sore feet, I was just way too tired. The night before we were getting ready to head home, we went back to the Beach Club a little earlier than usual to pack up. I guess to be accurate, Tina packed most of it, but I was there…..that counts right???

Anyway, just after packing, Tina just about fell asleep before her head hit the pillow. I grabbed my tripod and went out for a walk. These were all taken between 11:45pm and 2:00am on Friday November 19th.

The Solarium…

The Villa’s

The main entrance…

The view from the street entrance

The entrance going into the Beach Club.

The Bus Stop

The Wooden Bridge

View from the Wooden Bridge

Looking towards the quiet pool area.

The Main Lobby. (Those poor kids were just arriving at 12:30am)

Out back looking toward The Boardwalk

To the left with the butterfly bush.

My back is toward the Boardwalk

The Hotel going toward the International Gateway

 

[NateNLogansDad]

Another shot looking at the back of the lobby. I thought it looked cool with the lights flaring against the sky like that. (Storm Along Bay is to my left.)

The most amazing view at night time, looking across the lake at the Boardwalk.

Tried something a little different with the lighthouse. This is where you catch the ferries to either Epcot or Hollywood Studios.

Dance Hall on the Boardwalk.

One more Boardwalk View….

The Pirate Ship Water Slide. You climb up into the crows nest and the slide goes across the walkway and back into the pool area.

Some Storm Along Bay pictures…..

Walking the pier towards the ferry stop…

 

[NateNLogansDad]

Looking back on the pier towards the Yacht Club.

From the pier towards the Boardwalk

From the lighthouse, towards the Beach Club

From the pier towards the Pirate Ship Water Slide.

Back in the lobby, checking out the Chocolate and Gingerbread Carousel.

 

[NateNLogansDad]

Inside the Solarium…

Some Mickey’s in that picture…..

Some Mickey’s from that picture…..

The main sitting section from one angle….

And another…..

Still in the Solarium….

 

[NateNLogansDad]

Leaving the Solarium, heading back to the Villa’s

Looking in the direction of the front entrance….

Entering the Villa’s

Sitting area in the Villas…

Quiet Pool Area.

Quiet Pool Area Hot Tub

Hot Tub Rules and proof of my dedication to my fellow Dis’ers!

At 2am my tripod turns into a pumpkin so I headed up to our room for a power nap before starting our final day.

That’s all I have for now. There’s really only 3 more pictures that I’d like to post soon but I need to set up my scanner first. Two are ones we purchased from the Pirate’s League, the third is one I purchased on Splash Mountain when Nate and his cousin Kyle rode it for their first time.

I hope you guys had a good time. I am so homesick after this trip down memory lane after looking at all these pictures again!

 

[Soopafly]

Phew! Finally caught up after reading through about 25 pages lol. Great trip report and thanks for sharing, I was making little notes to comment on stuff so here goes......Guess it proves I did read the whole thing

I really like the lightsabers the kids had, I am always secretly wanting to build my own everytime we go past the shop in DTD. Sadly the adult in me stops me every time.

I was really impressed (and a little jealous) with the shots you managed to get during Festival of the lion king and Finding Nemo. We don't tend to sit near the front for those things so my pictures always come out crappy but well done for getting yours

I'm glad you gave Animal Kingdom a second chance, most people shy away from it because there aren't enough thrill rides or because they think it's too hot but that suits AK lovers like ourselves right? We are doing something special there this year, but I can highly recommend the backstage safari. It isn't very expensive but even if it was, you would think it was worth it.

Glad you finally made it to a rope drop! We used to do MK rope drops as well but would always just miss the show. We caught it last year and it made us both so happy, huge grins and all. Really like the first castle shot you took, was it edited in any way? I have lens envy

Splash Mountain is so cool, have never been as brave as you to attempt the shots of the rabbit on front whilst going down the drop, im scared of dropping the camera! I am ashamed to admit that I have never noticed the Brer Fox, Bear & Rabbit statues next to the Fastpass machines, I will make sure to get pictures next time.

Again, I did not notice the rocking chair by the water, will be on the look out for that as well. I can highly recommend the rocking chair at AKL by the firepit outside but after reading further ahead, I see you have already noticed it.

Swordfights are great arent they? Think Stef would have died of embarrassment and walked off if it was me
I do agree with you that sometimes you just need to put the camera down and see things through your own eyes rather than through a lens. We go to WDW to enjoy the rides as well as the photography

Aaaah The Polynesian, our home away from home. Thanks for the pictures, I did drift off for a bit. Glad you enjoyed Ohana's. I am scared that the singing woman will drag me up or something if she sees a birthday pin/badge or honeymoon one lol. If you can, try to do a breakfast one morning. It's a great place to be in the mornings and the fruit is very nice.

Woohoo a birthday in WDW! It really is the best feeling, when you waje up and remember where you are. Really puts a smile on your face doesn't it? Tshirt is awesome!! Very Ron Burgundy/Anchorman - "I'm kind of a big deal"

Great Test Track pics. It is one of my favourite rides in WDW. I think they changed the hot and cold temps though because it wasn't as hot/cold as it used to be in my opinion. My mission this year is to ride it in the dark!

We have never been on or near Figment now that I think about it. Is it worth doing or can you skip it?

Great shots of the Mexico and France areas, especially the France oes from across the bridge. Did you use over 8000 ISO? How did you keep steady for that?!

I'm not a huge fan of the muppets to be honest, though we love Muppets Christmas Carol and 3D shows, so I can enjoy this attraction. One Mans Dream was down for rehab when we last visited so we will be checking it out this trip for sure. I'm the same as you in that I read books and facts and stories but I had to skip all of your photos so I don't spoil it for myself. I want to see it for the first time in person.

I did like the Artsy Fartsy shot in Beauty & The Beast, came out very well. It's a really good show but it's also the best place to catch someones bugs though

Those kids are much braver than I am! I HATE HATE TOT! Never again will I go on it lol. The suspense & build up combined with my hatred for that type of drop? I left white as a ghost

Rocking Rollercoaster is great ride. We like this version much better than the one at Disneyland Paris. I will scan and send/post our ride photo from there. You will love it especially if you like people pulling silly faces + we have some special guests on board with us

Marshmallow in white chocolate? That's now on the list of must have snacks so thanks for that!

Back to AK? Woohoo! Nice poncho lol, I can't wear them personally but I will be buying one and wrapping the camera bag in it for Kali. If I get wet that's fine but if the camera does?

I do enjoy It's tough to be a bug but that's because it's really gimicky 3D, in your face you know? I think that's how 3D movies should be in the cinema, not just for depth perception. Also I did the same as you, went crazy taking pics of the Tree of life. So many animals and it's fun trying to spot them all.

Absolutely HATE dinosaur! Stef wants to drag me back on it

Glad you went into Innoventions and had fun, it is a very overlooked place but there is so much to do and so much fun to be had! Can't wait to build my own coaster again.

Again thanks for sharing this trip with us, I can see how much your family means to you hope that in the future, i'll be taking the exact same shots you were

 

[Bethislucy]

Great pictures! Sounds like it was an awesome trip, thank you for sharing. I hope your next trip isn't to far away.

 

[beebeeryan]

WOW, I just spent hours hooked on this, came over from Stefy's "Wedding and Disneymoon" PTR. I admit, I mostly looked at the pics since I am a photo nut, but I did read a lot of it too. Amazing trip and I was tearing up there at the end, about your thanking your mom for converting you into DIS'ers.

I'll be keeping an eye out for another Photographic journey TR from you! I think I may just jump in and do one of my own after we get back in August.

 

[Stefy]

Gorgeous pictures, the BC really is a beautiful resort. Maybe we will stay there one of these days

The art photos are v cool, gotta love some Disney art

Oh well, at least October isn't too far away, you be back home before you know it

 

[ryels]

Awesome trip report . You took some great photos. I hope you keep doing reports after your future trips.

We'll be at the BC next month, and I can't wait. You totally got me psyched up and ready to go!

 

[abcangie87]

Hey there! I am about 1/2 way thru your TR and loving it. You crack me up!

FYI, in case you didn't know (this goes back to a mention of FPs clear at the beginning), you can use your FP after it expires too... if you miss your window of time you can still use it. Did you know that? I didn't until our last trip, and it worked for us!

Looking forward to reading the rest! Have a great day!

 

[DevonsDisneyMom]

Rob!!! By far one of the BEST trip reports that I have read in a LONG time!!! thank yoy for sharing all your wonderful family memories! Make sure you let mek now when you start your May TR! But honestly I am REALLY looking forward to our Oct trip report since I know a good amount of the people going! Enjoy your upcoming trip!

PS thank you for the extra pictures of the Beach Club at the end there! We may only be getting to spend 2 nights there before our Disney Cruise, but I am sure looking forward to it!

 

[abcangie87]

Alright, I finally got thru the whole thing!! Great job!

We are DVC owners over at Bay Lake Tower and you have definately solidified our desire to try Beach Club out sometime! Looks great!

We've been to WDW 3 times since having kids, in May we are going on our
3rd Disney cruise. (We have DD7 and DD3). There are some things in your TR that we still HAVE NOT done (like FotLK, and Nemo, if you can believe it!). now since reading your TR I'm looking at hubby and saying "When are we doing WDW again?!?!" We kept telling ourselves that our 2012 vaca needs to be somewhere else, but I don't really want to go anywhere else right now! And we don't have the vacation time or $$$ for airline tickets for TWO trips in one year!

Did you ever figure out the name of your lifeboat on the jungle cruise?
How's your foray into looking into moving down there going? We've tossed the idea around ourselves, actually!

I've got six weeks till our trip and I've got so much to do, but hopefully I can catch up with you more on some other threads, etc!

Thanks for sharing your trip with us!

 

[NateNLogansDad]

Phew! Finally caught up after reading through about 25 pages lol. Great trip report and thanks for sharing, I was making little notes to comment on stuff so here goes......Guess it proves I did read the whole thing

Dude, you're too funny taking notes That's dedication[/B]

I really like the lightsabers the kids had, I am always secretly wanting to build my own everytime we go past the shop in DTD. Sadly the adult in me stops me every time.

As a favor to me, the next time you go I want you to get one. Leave the Adult part of you back on the plane and go nuts. Take it one step further and get one early in the week and carry it with you in Hollywood Studios. As soon as you see a kid (in a stroller, walking, getting yelled at by his/her parents , whatever ) extend it out like a Jedi would and come at him/her in a threatening manner. If you only spend 5 minutes fighting them I'd be surprised. You gotta admit that sounds like fun!!!

I was really impressed (and a little jealous) with the shots you managed to get during Festival of the lion king and Finding Nemo. We don't tend to sit near the front for those things so my pictures always come out crappy but well done for getting yours

For the FOTLC It's nice how lit up the stage is. I set my camera to Shutter Priority @ 1/30th of a second, with the ISO at 3200 and Exposure Comp to +1. My lens was mostly around 100mm while shooting so ideally I would have liked to have been around 1/100th or faster for a more crisp shot more often. Basically I shot as much as I could and hoped for the best. There were plenty of pictures that didn't make the cut. My goal is for 1 out of 10 pictures to be keepers. I usually average about 3 out of 10 in the dark which for me isn't bad at all. I knew my camera handles 3200 ISO OK in that situation (there's other times where it would have shown too much noise) but a higher ISO would have really been terrible. So at my highest ISO with the slowest shutter speed I let the camera decide on the Aperture. Make sure your Metering is set to center weighted so it tries to meter on the subject and not the background at all and you're good to go.

With Nemo, I cheated a little but I think it was a good idea. I took a few pictures in "Auto Without Flash" mode. I looked at them on the LCD screen and found a couple that the exposure seemed about right and looked at the settings. The Shutter wasn't fast enough at 1/15th of a second (you get too much motion blur from people moving) so I set it to Shutter Priority again, bumped up the ISO to 3200 and the Exposure Comp to +1. This gave me 2 stops to use to make the shutter speed faster. I went from 1/15th to 1/60th and maintained the same exposure that the camera told me was correct.

I'm glad you gave Animal Kingdom a second chance, most people shy away from it because there aren't enough thrill rides or because they think it's too hot but that suits AK lovers like ourselves right? We are doing something special there this year, but I can highly recommend the backstage safari. It isn't very expensive but even if it was, you would think it was worth it.

Maybe one day when the boys are a little older. The minimum age for that tour is 16. Who knows, by then they may want to go to a different park than their old fogey parents .


Glad you finally made it to a rope drop! We used to do MK rope drops as well but would always just miss the show. We caught it last year and it made us both so happy, huge grins and all. Really like the first castle shot you took, was it edited in any way? I have lens envy

I went to go look for the original file but I think I deleted them all. I shot in RAW all week long so if I screwed up an exposure, I might have been able to correct it later on the computer. I imported them all into Photoshop Elements 8 and tried the Auto settings on each one. I was surprised at how many pictures Adobe made worse by using Auto. If that was the case, I just did an undo and moved on. Maybe the people at Adobe and I just have different tastes So, if any editing was done at all, it would have been this....... Open up RAW File, Click Auto for White Balance, Auto for Exposure, bump up Saturation by 3 or 4 points and the same with Contrast. By looking at that castle shot, I may have bumped up the sharpness but I'm not positive.

I had intentions of doing some HDR pictures by combining 3-5 pictures together with all different kinds of exposures on this trip but I highly misjudged my levels of laziness. Maybe next trip


Splash Mountain is so cool, have never been as brave as you to attempt the shots of the rabbit on front whilst going down the drop, im scared of dropping the camera! I am ashamed to admit that I have never noticed the Brer Fox, Bear & Rabbit statues next to the Fastpass machines, I will make sure to get pictures next time.

I don't know about brave...maybe just ignorant. I had never been on it before and had no idea what I was in for except for the last drop. I had a rain sleeve on the camera the whole time and the neck strap wrapped around my wrist so many times it would have taken my arm off if it got caught on anything I didn't do the statues justice though....maybe next trip.

Again, I did not notice the rocking chair by the water, will be on the look out for that as well. I can highly recommend the rocking chair at AKL by the firepit outside but after reading further ahead, I see you have already noticed it.

I find a lot of things chasing the kids around Well, they find the things, and I catch up. I probably never would have seen it on my own. I was pretty compfy though! I could see myself sitting there watching the raft go to Tom Sawyers island all day. In a few years we are hoping to move down to FL. After that I'm looking forward spending a few days at the parks and do nothing but sit in chairs like that and just relax.

Swordfights are great arent they? Think Stef would have died of embarrassment and walked off if it was me
I do agree with you that sometimes you just need to put the camera down and see things through your own eyes rather than through a lens. We go to WDW to enjoy the rides as well as the photography

Swordfights are the best! We still have them here in the living room,dining room, and into the kitchen. The boys grab their light sabers and I get a plastic sword or two and we go at it for a while. I even bump it up a notch and play POTC music on my laptop sometimes

WDW is so hard for me to enjoy with my eyes sometimes. I feel like I NEED to shoot everything I see. I'm getting better, but it's just so hard! I love seeing the boys so happy which makes me happy. I think one of these days I'm going to go to the parks with no camera at all. I might need some anxiety medication to do it, but I think it needs to be done.

Aaaah The Polynesian, our home away from home. Thanks for the pictures, I did drift off for a bit. Glad you enjoyed Ohana's. I am scared that the singing woman will drag me up or something if she sees a birthday pin/badge or honeymoon one lol. If you can, try to do a breakfast one morning. It's a great place to be in the mornings and the fruit is very nice.

Dinner @ Ohana's is my one of my most favorite meals so far in all of Disney. I'm not sure I could pass up their steak, pork, turkey, shrimp, and chicken for some fruit Na, just kidden. I saw the breakfast you guys had and it's definitely one to consider for an upcoming trip. For our October trip, we are doing the quick service plan but we have 25 of us going back to O'hana for diner. Tina and I will be the only ones who have ever eaten there so they better not mess up that night! I CAN NOT WAIT!!!!!!

Continued in the next post.......