Monday, October 08, 2012

Peter Pan's Flight (Magic Kingdom) on-ride photos

It's notoriously difficult to take pictures in dark rides, especially VERY dark ones like Peter Pan. I freely admit I'm basically a hack with no high-end photography skills, and I use amateur equipment (most of the pictures in our recent Epcot-30 retrospective book are historical in nature, and most were taken by Jeff Lange).

These here were shot in one ride-through using a Canon Rebel XT, a Sigma 1.4 lens (great for dark rides), on aperture priority ("TV") mode and manual focus. I discarded several dozen pics from the same trip. My method is to focus early on something bright, then switch to manual and not touch the lens again, but fire rapidly through the whole ride.



I used Photoshop to lighten the Levels on all these pics, making them grainy. Like I said, a hack, but I lack real equipment. And since I process thousands of pics per month, I shoot in JPG (the horror!) since I have no time to deal with RAW on so many pics and still have a life.

All that said, here are the dark ride photos, for what they are worth!
















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Kevin Yee is the author of numerous independent Disney books, including the popular Walt Disney World Earbook series and Walt Disney World Hidden History.