Hello fellow photo enthusiasts. I found out about this site from the mousefest photography activity, the magic kingdom photo tour for the 10th. I won't be arriving until after the earlier night tour, which I'm bummed about because I'm a fan of night photography, and I've extensively covered Epcot but have done little in MK except for Tommorowland. Of course I'll be doing it on my own in any case, but it'd be fun to see how other people handle the unique challenges of night shooting in Disney World. I should be able to make the daylight MK tour although I may be a wee bit late to it, I'll be prepared to hunt the group down if need be. I have no decent picture of myself because, well, I'm always BEHIND the camera. I grab a few shots of myself on some rides, like the outdoor portion of Test Track, but they always turn out bizzare.. I pull these incredibly unpleasant faces. I'm a fairly hard core amateur photographer. I recently won second place in a photo contest held my my local zoo which I'm still rather excited about. I'm strictly an SLR shooter, which can get rather bulky for Disney World but it's my way. While other people are content to casually grab a shot with their cell phone camera I'm trying to get the best shooting position, bracing one arm on a railing for stability, pointing a jumbo sized telephoto lens at my prey (er, subject), and firing off two or three shots at a time. My last trip to Disney World yielded 1,238 shots and I consider that a dissapointing total. I would have had more, but it was right in the middle of summer and I just couldn't stand carrying my gear all day long through the hellish inferno that is the Florida Summer. I'm technically quite competent, although I have difficulty with extracting the absolute best that my camera can provide, such as getting the widest possible dynamic range. My real limitation though is artistic, my style is very limited. Give me animals and I do portrait style headshots. Around Disney World I tend to just point the camera at the usual landmarks and take the usual pictures. Of course I've done fireworks too. My shots look good, but they all tend to look the same. Even my night pictures are very predictable. Some of them are, to me, at least as good as the stuff you find in books published by Disney, but at the same time they're almost the same shots. I need to learn to look beyond my usual habits and see all the potential that exists in everything around me. I saw some empty forums on my way over to post this.. so.. I think it's time to put a few pictures on them.
hi there, dan. i sense that i have a fellow hardcore like me with you here. that's great because there are so many different kinds of shooters like you mentioned and i like to see all of their viewpoints. i admit, you wrote a lot of the things that i do, from trying to get the best spot, to shooting 1000's of frames, to lugging a backpack full of lenses, etc. i also love night time disney photos as evidenced by the amount of them in my galleries on the main pages. i look forward to seeing some of your work, maybe we can 'push' each other to work harder and get even better images.
