A night out at the Magic Kingdom

When you look at my galleries on the menu bar it is pretty obvious, that we like to spend our holidays at Disney World. This year I had the chance to go out on a late photowalk in Disney’s Magic Kingdom. It is always a great experience to walk around the parks late at night with the camera and take pictures of the attractions. I was out to get some long exposures or long exposure series to have the fewest guests possible in the pictures. My goal was to give the pictures an abandoned/dreamy look in the post-processing.

After a few test pictures, it was clear that I could take the images without the use of an ND-filter because an aperture of approx. f/11 and smaller was sufficient to realize the desired exposure times.

But the real challenge is to take pictures in the parks “without guests”. Those visitors, who only walk through the image can be neglected because of the exposure time. But when someone in a Disney Park sets up a tripod with a camera on it, people often stop right in front of your camera and start to pose ;) , because they think you’re working for Disney and are still waiting to take pictures of them. This means that you have to photograph many settings repeatedly to get a “clean” image in post-processing)

What I will pay particular attention to next time, is that the new areas of the park are very dimly lit. Which is why you should stand close to your tripod so that it is not accidentally knocked over (as in my case). Luckily, I was able to catch it before the camera went down.

On the bright side, I was rewarded with almost no winds, which gave me sharp palm leaves, even in my longest exposures. But the clouds were moving quite fast what was perfect to create an interesting sky in post.

Slideshow of the results: