View Full Version : Disney Photo Tips
Here are some tips that I have for general photography and for shooting at Disney Theme Parks. Feel free to add tips of your own.
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.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117450581-M.jpg
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.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117525199-M.jpg
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.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117525058-M.jpg
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.
This was the tip most often repeated to me by the experienced photographers I knew when I started. It means that you should try to fill your entire picture with interesting stuff. All to often people leave large sections of the picture filled with uninteresting or even distracting things.
A classic mistake comes when taking a picture of another person. Your instinct is to look right through the middle of the lens straight into their eyes. That would be great if people's eyes were in the middle of their bodies, but they aren't. So what usually results is an interesting bottom half for the picture and a bunch of wasted space above the person. Instead of putting their eyes in the middle, aim lower so that you fill the picture frame with your subject.
Here's the wrong way:
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/118269406-M.jpg
Here is the picture cropped so that it "fills the frame":
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117479494-M.jpg
OK, this probably works better when you aren't shooting a pudgy looking goomer on a geeky contraption.
Nothing annoys me more than spending 5 minutes getting a shot set up and then finding out when I get home that someone blinked during the picture. Aargh! Have you ever tried painting open eyes on a blinker in Photoshop? Not fun.
Remind yourself - it's digital, no one is charging me for shots I don't keep. When you spend time and trouble setting up a shot, take several. Whenever I pose people, I always fire off a quick burst of 3 or more shots.
Throwing mistakes away is much easier than trying to fix shots with flaws. Just make sure that you throw away the extras. No one really wants to look through three shots in a row of the same exact scene.
Most digital cameras have a little chart called a histogram. The histogram shows you how many pixels you have at different brightness levels. The values on the left edge of the histogram are pixels that are black. The values on the right edge of the histogram are pixels that are white. Your goal is to get an exposure in which all of the pixels fall somewhere in the middle.
This is a good histogram because it doesn't touch either the right or left edge.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/142008191-M.jpg
This histrogram shows that the picture is overexposed. You see part of the histogram piled up on the right edge. That means that some parts of the picture got too much light and are now just blank white.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/142008188-M.jpg
This histogram shows that the picture is underexposed. You see part of the histogram piled up on the left edge. That means that some parts of the picture got too little light and are now just featureless black.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/142008190-M.jpg
Sometimes the range from dark to light in your picture is too big and you can't get everything between the edges. In those cases, it is usually better to keep from hitting the right edge. Dark shadows don't usually hurt a picture as much as bright, white patches.
You cannot avoid bright, white patches in some cases, like bright reflections or having the sun in the picture. In those cases, you have to decide whether you can recompose your picture to avoid the bright spots or whether you are better off just leaving them.
The rule of thirds helps you make an interesting composition. You people have a natural tendency to stick the subject of interest right smack in the middle of the picture. This generally results in a boring picture.
The rule of thirds says that you should divide your picture in to three sections across and three sections up and down. Put the interesting parts of the picture along the lines that divide the sections. The four places where the lines touch are the best places to put interesting parts of the picture.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/142009619-M.jpg
When you have a strong horizon line in your picture, don't stick it right in the middle of the picture. That leaves the viewer confused as to whether the picture is about the stuff below or above the horizon. If you push the horizon line down the botton third line, it says that this is a picture about stuff above the horizon. If you push the horizon up to the top third of the picture, it says that this is a picture about the stuff below the horizon.
Feel free to go to extremes. If you are taking a shot of a really cool sky, put the horizon down near the very bottom of the picture to really emphasize the sky. If you are taking a picture of a cliff and want to make it feel really tall, have it reach almost to the top of the picture.
Here's an example of getting the horizon wrong. Is this a picture about water or China?
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117480347-M.jpg
This picture is definitely about Mexico. It's not a very good picture, but at least you know what it's about.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117480880-M.jpg
When you put your subject to one side in a picture, you've created an open space on the other side. You should usually have your subject looking or moving towards the open space. That tells a story to your viewer about what is going to happen. If your subject is heading towards the short side of the frame, the story is that they are leaving.
In the example below, the motorcycle is on the right and is heading into the open space on the left.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117525021-M.jpg
Most people think that their flash is just for night pictures. It can also be very useful for filling shadows on sunny days. This is called "fill-in flash."
Often when we take a picture when the sun is bright and overhead, we get dark shadows under people's eyes and hats. Shadows from one person in the picture may obscure another person. Sometimes our subject is in the shade and the background is in the sun. All of these things make for lousy pictures.
When you think you might have a problem with shadows or dark areas in a picture, try taking a shot with your flash to help fill in those areas.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117449676-M.jpg
I always get a chuckle when someone takes a shot of Cinderella's Castle at night with a flash. That little flash on your camera isn't going to light up that big building from 200 feet away. If you aren't shooting something relatively nearby, don't waste your batteries; shut off your flash.
There are places at Disney where there is a good risk of getting wet (like Splash Mountain). Rather than leave your camera in your travel bag, bring along a plastic bag from the grocery store. Take all the shots you want until just before splashdown, then shove the camera in the plastic bag to protect it from splashes.
You can sometimes make a nice picture by using elements in the scene to create a "frame" around your subject. It could be trees on either side of them, the walls of a tunnel, or just about anything that works as a frame.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117450475-M.jpg
It's pretty dark and there is a lot of action. That makes for a difficult subject. Don't get discourage if you try your best and you don't get many (or any) good shots. Low light action photography is hard and it's one area where expensive cameras and lenses give a shooter a huge advantage.
First, set up your camera to get the best possible shots in the lowest light. For basic cameras, that means using some type of night shot mode. For fancier cameras, that means setting the ISO to the highest ISO that you are comfortable with (some cameras have ISO settings that are so noisy you don't want to use them). It also means opening the aperture as wide as possible.
Motion is your enemy. That means motion in your camera and motion in your subject. To help with your camera, turn on your image stabilizer if you have one. Use a monopod if you have one. Practice holding your camera really still when you take shots.
Subject motion is tough. This is a high energy show. I've never seen a really sharp picture of a monkey doing acrobatics. Your best option here is to shoot people that aren't moving much.
Here's a shot where the leads were standing in place getting each section to give their call.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117413400-M.jpg
There is one part of this show where motion actually makes for a good picture. Anytime you have a bright light source moving against a dark background, you can get some interesting motion effects from a relatively long exposure. The longer exposure gives the light source time to move around the picture. In the FotLK, the flame dude is good subject for this technique.
This is a 1/4 second exposure. Even with the image stabilizer, I didn't do a very good job of keeping the camera steady. A tripod would really have helped. Still, the subject is the trail of fire, which doesn't really need to be sharp, so the picture is OK anyway.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117413489-M.jpg
Because the fire is so bright, it's not really possible to get a good exposure for both the flames and the fire dude. With no disrepect for the fire dude, I think the flames make for a more interesting picture, so try to expose for them rather than the guy.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117413509-M.jpg
When taking pictures of things that are moving quickly, you have two options. You can use a high shutter speed, which freezes the motion, or you can use a low shutter speed and pan with the potion.
The first approach makes it easy to get a nice sharp shot of the subject. The problem is that creates a bizarre and unnatural looking photo. In the picture below, we know that the care is flying quickly through the air, but it just sort of seems frozen there. I don't think it makes for a very compelling story.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117524994-M.jpg
When you pan, you set the shutter speed to something relatively low (1/30 of a second will do) and you track the subject with your camera while you are taking the picture. When you do it well, your subject stays sharp and the background has a motion blur. This gives the viewer a sense of speed.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117524988-M.jpg
If you want to really make things look fast, you can use a very long shutter speed and track much further. Some image stabilizers have a special mode that helps with panning. In other cases, your image stabilizer might actually try to "correct" the panning motion and make things worse. Try pacticing on cars at home to see what works best for you.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117524992-M.jpg
I can't pan to save my life, so I cheat. I take the shot with a high shutter speed to freeze the action. Then I cut out my subject in photoshop and apply motion blur to the background. Then I paste subject back down on the picture. When shooting cars, I also apply radial blur to the wheels so that they look like they are spinning. It would be a lot easier to shoot it right in the first place, but that never seems to work for me.
You can use the same trick for relatively slow subjects to make them look fast as well.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/11988816-M.jpg
It's pretty common to get home and see that your shot wasn't framed perfectly. That's when the crop tool (my favorite) comes into play. Use it to chop out elements that you don't want. Use it to shift your subject up, down, left, or right. Sometimes you can even make two different interesting photos from one original just by cropping it differently.
These are the same pictures, but in the bottom one, I cropped out all of the boring parts.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/142055462-M.jpg
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117525191-M.jpg
When you crop, it is usually a good idea to use the same aspect ratio. That's a guideline, not a rule; sometimes using a different aspect ratio works better. Just be judicious, going through a collection of photos each with its own aspect ratio can be visually confusing.
Shooting really good panoramic shots often invovles special hardware and/or stiching toghether multiple pictures. An easier way is just to crop out the top and bottom of the picture. This technique doesn't let you get wider shots than your camera can normally take, but it does work well for subjects when you want to stress how long or how tall they are.
On our last trip, we rented a towncar to take us home from the airport. It wasn't any more expensive than parking at the airport and it was a lot less hassle. The towncar company was so busy on the day we got back, all they had left to pick us up with was a limo.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/142058724-M.jpg
The kid's loved it. To stress the "stretch" of the limo, I thought the shot worked better cropped like a panorama.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/142058653-M.jpg
Another place this works really well is at the World Showcase Lagoon. Ever stood on the shore and taken a wide shot trying to get in as many countries as possible? You probably also got a whole of sky or water. Unless you were lucky and had an interesting sky or a calm, reflective water, those were probably large parts of your photo with no visual interest. Crop them out so you have an interesting panorama instead.
Some people are so obsessed with their new digital camera or camcorder that they use it constantly on their trips. Remember to actually live your life on vacation rather than transform yourself into some sort of traveling photo/video director. If your memory of Spectro-Magic has a little plastic frame around it and exposure information at the bottom, you may have spent too much time recording your vacation and not enough time vacationing.
The same goes for posed photos. If you force everyone to stop what they are doing and form up for a group shot once or twice a day, you’re probably having a good time. On the other hand, if you do that once or twice an hour, you’ll end up with well posed shots of angry kids.
Make sure that you let strangers enjoy their vacation as well. It’s terribly annoying to idle in one spot while someone has an entire walkway blocked off for a picture that takes them 5 minutes to get right. If you must block a crowd to get your shot, be quick about it.
Where it is the seemingly endless repetition of triangles on Spaceship earth, or the repetition of stroller after stroller, patterns can make for good photographic subjects. It’s best if you completely fill your picture with the pattern. That gives the sense to the viewer that the pattern will keep repeating for ever.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117479412-M.jpg
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117480809-M.jpg
To add to PhotobearSam's comment about moving around and trying different perspectives, don't always shoot down at your kids. Most good photos of kids are taken when you get down on their level. Get eye to eye with them, see things from their perspective, and then shoot them.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117481113-M.jpg
Most of the time, it is best to shoot with the sun behind you or off to one side. One exception to that is when you shoot translucent objects. They often look better with light coming through them.
Here is a stained glass window with light reflecting from it:
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117480157-M.jpg
Here is the same window with light shining through it:
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117480184-M.jpg
Ever take a flash picture and have your subject come out OK but have everything behind them really, really dark? There are several ways to deal with that problem. First, increasing your ISO, opening your aperture wider, and slowing your shutter speed all help. Those changes will allow your camera to "see" more of the background. Your camera will probably lower the amount of flash to compensate.
Another trick that some cameras support is a mode that fires the flash but leaves the shutter open for a while longer. On a Canon, you make this happen by using the flash with the camera in AV mode. That allows the stuff in the front of the picture to be lit up by the flash while the stuff behind your subject is still exposed normally. Because the shutter is open for a long time, you should ask your subject to stay very still, even after the flash fires. You should also use a tripod or something else to hold your camera still.
Here are a couple of old examples from my film days:
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/143292697-M.jpg
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/143294461-M.jpg
And one from last year in a cave:
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/143294696-M.jpg
Disney fans seem to be big collectors. They collect pins. They collect autographs. How about themed photo collection? Pick a subject that you like and build a collection of photos of that subject. You could try to collect photos of as many different characters as possible. You could collect photos of the entrance signs of all the rides you go on.
Everyone gets the standard shots of the Castle, the Tree, etc. Those are good to have, but it's just as important to shoot the things that mean something special to you. Take time to shoot the little things that make your trip special.
I always like to take a shot of the pastries that we buy in France. Those are a highlight of our day at Epcot. Is it a great picture? Not really. That doesn't matter. It means something to me and that's what is important.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/3157143-M.jpg
Today's cameras can take pictures in less than 1/1000th of a second. That will freeze just about anything at the parks, regardless of how fast it is. That may not always be the best way to shoot a picture.
If the story you want your picture to tell is about speed, use a longer shutter speed. That gives the object in your picture a chance move a bit during the exposure.
Here are two pictures of Everest. The first was taken at 1/125th of a second. The second was taken at 1/13th of a second. The second gives a much better sense of the speed of the coaster.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117413061-M.jpg
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117413065-M.jpg
If you find a cool hat, a neat toy, or something else interesting at a shop, there is no rule that says that you have to buy it to shoot it. Put it on, take the shot, and put it back.
http://barbieri.smugmug.com/photos/117481195-M.jpg
Scottwdw
04-18-2007, 11:55 AM
Mark,
May I say a big thank you here? Your tips are wonderful and will help many get better and more interesting photos on their next trip to WDW or anywhere else for that matter.
I can't wait to try some of these ideas on my own next month. Ever try any Rear Sync flash photos there? I will be doing some at the Boardwalk on my next trip over Memorial Day weekend.
Thanks, again!
I am glad that you enjoyed the tips and found them useful. I haven't done a second curtain sync flash shot in years, so I don't have a good example to post. Here's a rough explanation for those unfamiliar with the concept.
Save The Flash For Last
Most of the time when people take a flash photo, the flash fires as soon as the shutter opens. That works well for most subjects. In some cases, however, you want things to work the opposite way.
Imagine a picture of a car driving at night. If the picture was taken with a flash in the normal mode and the shutter stayed open long enough for the car to drive about 5 feet during the picture, it would look strange. The car would look OK because it would be illuminated only while the flash was firing. The strange thing would be the lights on the car. They would show up in the picture from where the car was at the start of the picture (when the flash went off) to where the car was at the end of the picture (5 feet further away). It would look like the car was sitting still shooting 5 foot beams of light out of it's headlamps.
Imagine now that we change our camera to fire the flash at the end of the picture. Now everything looks the same except that the lights trail behind the headlamps instead of shooting out in front. This gives us the sense that the car has moved 5 feet forward during the picture and looks much more natural.
So why don't cameras always fire the flash at the end? Because most of the time there aren't bright lights moving through the picture. Most of the time, you want your subject frozen the moment you press the shutter button.
Why is it called Second Curtain Sync? The shutter on a DSLR actually consists of two little curtains. The first moves across the frame letting light hit the film or sensor. The second curtain comes along behind it covering up the film or sensor. If the first move across and then came back, one side would get a lot more light than the other side. With second curtain sync, the flash is syncronized with the second curtain and fires just before it starts to cover up the picture.
When you take a really, really fast picture (like 1/1000th of a second), there isn't any time during which the entire sensor or film is exposed. The second curtain starts covering up part of the picture before the first curtain has fully opened. It's sort of like a little slit that moves across the film or sensor. This is why most flashes limit you to 1/125 or 1/250 of a second. Those are the fastest shutter speeds where the first curtain has opened all the way up and the second curtain hasn't started closing up yet.
vBulletin® v3.7.4, Copyright ©2000-2012, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.