Only one more day to go - trip report now complete

[Master Mason]

FWIW, when all was said and done, I took 4,035 photos in seven days.

Slacker, only about 600 a day

 

[Groucho]

Slacker, only about 600 a day

It was actually strange, I had a couple "off" days.

Day 1: 627
Day 2: 271
Day 3: 627 (how weird is that? same # as day 1!)
Day 4: 675
Day 5: 863
Day 6: 391
Day 7: 575

I don't know why day 2 had so little shooting. We were at AK, which is generally pretty great for photography. I still need to run everything through ExposurePlot and see how my focal length usage, etc, breaks down, I'll be curious to see the results.

All that, and I missed a fair number of shots that I had planned to do, never shot Wishes, and had a couple issues the one time I shot Illuminations. (I think I still got some keepers there, though.) I will say, being with a 3-year-old, to say nothing of having just the two adults plus kid plus stroller, really makes photography a challenge sometimes! Maybe I need to work on that solo trip one of these days......

DisneySuiteFreak, I'll try to get some shots of the tripod strap done soon and put them up here (or maybe in a new thread, but I'll at least mention it in here.)

 

[MassJester]

You set a very high bar.

I have to admit I missed shooting Wishes and Illuminations too thise past trip. And I most certainly wanted to. But it was a condensed trip and truth-be-told I just got too sleepy at the end of the day.

Brilliant work.

 

[DisneySuiteFreak]

DisneySuiteFreak, I'll try to get some shots of the tripod strap done soon and put them up here (or maybe in a new thread, but I'll at least mention it in here.)

Thanks!

 

[Groucho]

Thanks again guys.

DSF, the tripod is sitting next to me, I'll try to get the strap photos done soon.

I have finished day two now... some AK and a bunch of merchandise photos from Art of Disney at Downtown Disney. (Did I mention that I love those stores? )

This one was a little blown out so I blew it out intentionally even more for effect and made it b/w...

A mildly fishy (14mm) shot.

Heavily desaturated...

Here's a few more Spectros from day one.

Some from Downtown.

That's enough for one post, I'd say... hope you like 'em.

 

[Dcanoli]

Great, as usual, but gotta ask--

You've got some freaky ISOs going on...what does the 20D do? Seems like I saw an 1100 and maybe a 4500, was that right?

 

[Snowy-girls]

Lovin your photo's .x.

 

[Groucho]

Thanks folks!

Great, as usual, but gotta ask--

You've got some freaky ISOs going on...what does the 20D do? Seems like I saw an 1100 and maybe a 4500, was that right?

The K20D can do half-steps with the ISO - that means 100, 140, 200, 280, 400, 560, 800, 1100, 1600, 2200, 3200, 4500, and 6400. I think it might even be able to do it in third steps but I don't remember for sure off the top of my head. You'll see 4500 a lot because for most of the trip, I had Auto ISO set to max at 4500, I should have left it at 6400 (I did occasionally) but oh well...

 

[Dcanoli]

Okay, gotcha!

 

[crazydadguy]

Thanks! The photos all still have their exif data attached. If using Firefox (and if you're not, you should be ), grab the Fxif add-on. For IE, there's Opanda Exif.

For those specific ones:
Crystal Palace: 10mm, 1/250s, F4.5, ISO 100.
Contemporary: 10mm, 20s, F9.5, ISO 200.
Tomorrowland: 10mm, 15s, F9.5, ISO 200. (These two are ISO 200 as that's the lowest you can use when you have the expanded dynamic range turned on.)


Those actually are better than many of the ones that I got. Based on what I've seen in the past and what I've found on my last trip, manual focus on the dark rides may not be as much of a handicap as I had thought. At the very least, you'll get some shot, without the camera wasting any time whatsoever looking for focus itself.

I never knew you could get an exif addon for firefox!! That rocks!! Thanks for the tip!!

 

[Groucho]

There's actually a couple exif plugins for Firefox... I like FxIF best, there's also Exif Viewer which shows more information - too much, usually, and is harder to read, so I don't use it very often. And I believe Opanda also installs a plug-in, along with the stand-alone program, but I've never used it so I don't know for sure.

Now that you have that, you can start getting frustrated at Smugmug and the others who strip exif data out of resized photos.

 

[DisneySuiteFreak]

Now that you have that, you can start getting frustrated at Smugmug and the others who strip exif data out of resized photos.

Even Photobucket strips the Exif info if you resize it; it didn't when I first started using it. Sucks!
Love the new set of photos Groucho! I am so jealous of the high ISOs you can get w/ your camera!

 

[Groucho]

A few more photos... these from Epcot.

Who says you can't shoot into the sun? There's my son in the corner making sure to point out the monorail for us.

Another monorail shot.

This one's a self-portrait if you look really closely........

The focus is closer to the flowers than the dinosaur, but oh well...

From Canada.

OK, this one is just weird.

A couple more fisheyes...

Some pots in Morocco.

This one can only be called "0bli0 style".

Here's another variation on the bansai tree shot from earlier in the thread (which bombed in the photo contest ). This one is closer to the tree (no greenery below) and has a larger DoF.

In other news, I finally picked up a Spyder2Express for color calibration (only $60 from Amazon!) and it definitely made a difference. I'm not going to go back and redo my earlier photos but I have a little more confidence now that when I adjust colors, that they're going to look like they should.

 

[Steve's Girl]

Have really enjoyed your photos. Thanks for posting. Hope we get to see more!

 

[DisneyFreak06]

Incredible pictures! I very much enjoyed looking at them. Thanks for posting!

I'm so now going to look for some new toys for my camera, including a new camera with a higher ISO! LOL It will be a while though.

Thanks again.

 

[DisneySuiteFreak]

Nice!!!

 

[Gdad]

Excellent last series- you get a lot of mileage out of that fisheye!

 

[Groucho]

Thanks guys! I do love that fisheye.

I just finished day 3, and in amongst my other annoyances during my Illuminations shoots (finding a spot, making sure my kid wasn't bumping my tripod (though hanging the camera bag from the center post sure helps stability), the plug on my homemade one starting to fall apart (I blame Radio Shack ), I found two more annoyances: 1) The very first fireworks shot, which I think turned out fantastic, is poorly framed so about a third of it is off screen It's hard to frame the shots early as it's very hard to see the fireworks barges, and to know which is which. Unless you're there all the time, of course.
2) Somehow in my flipping the camera around and swapping lenses, it jumped into JPG mode for about half the photos (and back to raw then back to jpg) - very annoying as these were shots that could have really benefited from some Raw tweaking (bringing back blown-out inferno barge detail, etc.) Very annoying! I also have no idea how it happened. That was the only time in the whole trip... once or twice I bumped the Raw button, which flips it to raw+jpg for a single shot, I've since set it so the raw button basically does nothing, just makes sure it's in raw mode.

Anyway... I am still mostly happy, I was a little nervous while I was there but as I go through in Lightroom, I'm finding more keepers than I suspected.

Here's some more Epcot ones, hope you like!

That's funny, it felt like faster than 0 mph... (We must have just passed the sensor, assuming it is a real speed sensor, as the photo just before this showed 64.7 mph.)

I took this one just about 60 seconds before meeting Gdad.

I love this one, especially when viewed at 100%.

This is one of those pesky jpg shots. Argh!

Not every long-exposure night photo has to be taken at F8-F11... this one's F2.4.

That's plenty for one message... there's plenty more where those came from.

 

[Dcanoli]

That's plenty for one message... there's plenty more where those came from.

EXCELLENT! Gives me plenty of ideas/goals to shoot for in September!

...and let's get to posting "plenty more!"

 

[Code]

Really great trip report, Groucho. Your photos are excellent! The HM bride shot with the lit eyes is truly haunting.

I too have gotten quite a few ideas for my Sept trip Hope to see many more!