Splash Mountain River Boat

Splash Mountain

You can only get this shot from the Train as you are passing through the tunnel that is by the Splash Mountain ride.  You can get a similar one while you are on the ride but looking down on it you have to take it as you go pass the window in the tunnel.
1/320, f/1.4, ISO 1250 with a 35mm lens

It's A Small World

It's A Small World

This is a picture of one of the dolls in the It's A Small World ride at Disneyland.  This was taken with a Nikon D7000, 1/100, f/2.8, ISO 800, 116mm

A fair amount of work was done in Lightroom to bring out the details.

Mike from the Monsters Inc ride at Disney's California Adventure

Mike Wazowski from Monsters Inc.

This is Mike from the Monsters Inc ride at Disney's California Adventure.  This was taken with a Nikon D600 with the following settings: 1/320, f/1.4, ISO 1600 using a 35mm lens.  Some color correction using the white balanced that was about it.  They use some very harsh lights in this ride (as they do in most of the dark rides) so those needed to be pulled out.  The colors here are green and blue in most of the scenes.  It is hard to pull those colors out and still have some color for Mike and Sulley since they are green and blue!?

Tea anyone? Alice in Wonderland ride at Disneyland

Tea anyone?

This is from the Alice in Wonderland ride at Disneyland.
This was taken with a Nikon D800, 1/100, f/1.4, ISO 1600 with a 35mm lens.  It had a little noise in it, next time I will try an slightly lower ISO and maybe a faster shutter speed as well.  But all in all, not bad.

The Tiger from the Jungle Cruise

Tiger from the Jungle Cruise Ride

I think the saying is that he can jump more than 10 feet, so do not worry he will just jump right over the boat.
This was taken with a Nikon D800, 1/500, f/2.5 (I should have used an f-stop of around 8 to get more of the area right by him in focus) ISO 400 (might have been able to have lowered that a little to 200 as it looks like there was a lot of light) with an 85mm lens.
One of the big considerations on all of the rides is the change in the light conditions as you go from one scene to another.  Here the light is fairly bright but if you have been on the ride you know that just around the corner it becomes a lot darker due to all of the trees.  It was not always that way with the Jungle Cruise, when it first opened it was more like the Desert Cruise due to the lack of any major vegetation.  But now there are a lot of areas where the trees are blocking out the sun so you have to be able to make the adjustments on your camera quickly.  Again, you are moving on a boat and most of the animals are also moving so you will need to use a fast shutter speed.

Disneyland, Ghosts in the Graveyard

Ghosts in the Graveyard 

In a lot of ways it is to bad that it is so dark in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland because we are not able to see these great ghosts.  I would like to have the ride slow down, turn up the lights a little and let us enjoy the view!
This picture was taken with a Nikon D800 at 1/80, f/1.4, ISO 4000 using a 35mm lens.
I have not idea what color any of this should be but at least we can see them (oh, wait how can we see ghosts?)

Ariel From Disney's California Adventure

Ariel 

Ariel the little Mermaid from Disney's California Adventure ride.  This was taken with a Nikon D800 with the settings of 1/200, f/2.8, ISO 2000 and with a 70mm lens setting.
On the ride when you get to this scene she is almost close enough to touch (well, maybe not that close, but a lot closer then the Pirates are) so you have to be careful not to zoom in to much.
 

Monsters Inc ride at Disney's California Adventure with Mike and Sulley

Mike & Sulley

Monsters Inc ride at Disneyland is considered another Dark Ride and with it comes all of the issues that you would normally have in taking pictures in Dark Rides.  The issues are 1) you are moving and what you are taking pictures of are also moving, 2) it is dark in there!, 3) they flood the whole thing with hash lights, in this case it is blue.
The problem is that Sulley is blue and if you take out the hash blue light you also turn Sulley into an Abominable Snowman and he will need to relocate to the Matterhorn.

This picture was taken with a Nikon D600 with the following settings, 1/320, f/1.4, ISO 1600 using a 35mm lens. This shot required a little work in Lightroom. The White Balance had to be adjusted in two different areas, the first was the right side of the picture with Sulley and the area where Mike is. The saturation was also reduced for the entire photograph but it was increased slightly in the area where Mike is. The shadows were also lightened up to bring out some of the detail for the doors that are going by.

The Crow in the Snow White Ride at Disneyland

The Crow in the Snow White Ride at Disneyland

This crow is just as you exit the Snow White ride.  As you get out of the vehicle he is staring you down.
Nikon D600, 1/80, f/1.4, ISO 1600 with an 85mm lens.  Nice Bokeh in the background and on him as well, really brings out his eye.

Mill at the Grizzly River Run at Disney'a California Adventure

Mill at the Grizzly River Run.

This is a picture of the Mill at the Grizzly River Run.  This was taken with a Nikon D600 at 1/4000 sec, f2/8, ISO 100 with a 14 mm lens setting.

Mary Poppins in a Disneyland Parade

 Mary Poppins!  It's a Jolly Holiday with Mary, Mary is the one who makes it right.

These are pictures of Mary Poppins in a Parade at Disneyland.
These were taken with a Nikon D800 and the setting for these was  1/500, f/3.2, ISO 125 with a 200mm lens.  The detail from the D800 is really amazing.

Flo's V8 Cafe at night at the Disney's California Adventure

Flo's V8 Cafe (a great place to eat!

As with so many pictures they can be taken a number of different ways.  Certainly a tripod would have been great to take a long shutter release with a filter, but this one was taken with a Nikon D600 with the following settings: 1/400, f/1.4, ISO 250 with an 85mm lens.
The sad part of the internet is that so many pictures have to be down sized and so much of the detail gets lost.
Make sure you click on the picture to get a larger version of it to see more of the detail.

Mickey and the Dragon in Fantasmic at Disneyland

Mickey and the Dragon in Fantasmic!

What a great show!  This is a picture of Mickey Mouse fighting the Dragon, (who was the evil queen or became the wicked witch). This shoot was taken with a Nikon D600 and the settings were: 1/500, f/2.8, ISO 1600, 70mm.
Even with the ISO at 1600 the picture still retains some of the details without having to much noise.

Chip and Dale in the Hub (with some Bokeh for good measure)

Chip & Dale Statues at the Hub

This is a shot of Chip and Dale at the Hub.  The Hub is called the Hub because it is like the Hub of a wheel where the spokes move out away from the Hub (can I used the Hub any more times in this one sentence?).  The spokes are the different "Lands".  If you continue north in the same direction that you took for walking up Main Street USA you will walk through the Sleeping Beauty Castle and into Fantasyland. Take a right and you will be walking towards Tomorrowland, left to Frontierland and a southwest turn will take you to Adventureland. When Disneyland originally opened these were the only "Lands" there were.  Now; of course, there is New Orleans Square, Critter Country and Toontown (how come they stopped calling them "Lands").  There are several statues in the Hub including the most famous one of all which is Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse.

This was taken with a Nikon D800, 1/4000 sec, f/1.4, ISO 100, 85MM.  With the very shallow f-stop (1.4) most of the back ground is blurred out (this is called Bokeh).  The more open the shutter (the lower the f-stop number) the more narrow area of focus the camera will have.  This is one of the great aspects about cameras, they can see things differently then we can.  Usually they see whatever is there and they do not have the eyes and brain that we have to weed out all of the distractions.  But in this case we can get the camera to take a picture of what is really not there, a blurred background.

Mickey at the start of Fantasmic! (one reason for a lot of Megapixels)

Mickey in Fantasmic 

Fantasmic has to be the greatest live show in the world, or dead show of all time, in the universe, for all time to come.  OK, maybe I like it, what do you think?

Here is Mickey at the start of the show with sprays of water coming down on him.  Click on the picture so you can see the detail.  

I took this with a Nikon D600, 1/400 of a second so I could stop the motion of the water, with an f/2.8 (so the only thing that was going to be in focus was Mickey, but it also opened the lens as far as it could to let in as much light as possible) ISO 1600 to off-set the high shutter speed (I might have gotten away with a slower shutter speed and a lower ISO setting but I can try that next time) with a 200mm lens zoomed in all the way.

Even with the longer lens I still had to crop the picture by about 60%.  If you crop pictures a lot then having a high megapixel camera really helps out to keep a lot of the detail.  The original picture was 24.7mbs in RAW format and the final cropped one in JPG is only 993KB.  A lot of the drop in size is converting it from RAW to JPG but with so much of the picture cropped out that reduced it a lot as well.  So if a picture starts off with 24MP and you crop it by 60% and then increase what is left to the same size as the original you end up with a picture that is about 10MP and you need ever megapixel you can have to keep as much detail as possible.  If you started with a picture that was 16MP and cropped it in half you would end up with a picture that was only 8MP.  So when someone asks if having a camera with a high number of MPs matters now you know that it can if you are going to crop a lot.

What is the right color for Disneyland Dark Rides?

Just increasing the Exposure

 These are both the same picture, the first one is right out of the camera with the only adjustment being an increase in the Exposure.  The shot was taken with the following settings: Nikon D800, 1/125, f/2.8 ISO 5000, 200mm  It came out very dark so I increased the exposure but it has a lot of unnatural light.  In the dark rides they flood each scene with hash lights.  In the POTC it is usually red (as they want to give you the idea that things are burning) and yellow.  In the Haunted Mansion it is green and blue.  It's A Small World changes from scene to scene and some areas actually change in color gradually over time.

After adjustments

Normally you do not notice these hash lights.  Your eyes and brain have a way of filtering them out.  Sadly a camera is not able to do that, so when we take a picture everything that is there is what we start off with.  People can take pictures and look at them and say "that is not how I remembered that scene".  Which is true because your eyes have an amazing way of allow you to see what you want to see.

On the second one I changed the orange Hue more to the yellow end, reduced the saturation of Orange, Yellow and green and lowered the Luminance of Orange to blend in with the yellow that was left.  I added some noise reduction but not a lot otherwise a lot of the detail would be gone.  I increased the blacks and shadows and lowered the highlights (the skull was getting blown out) and increased the contrast. (All adjustments were done in Lightroom). You can click on them to see a larger version, keep in mind that I did reduce the size and pixel count of these to upload them so you are not going to see what would be actually printed).

I have to say that I still do not like the shot very much.  I can adjust the amount of blue in the background and change the Luminance of it.  It also needs to have some color added back into it.  But the idea is to try and get to something that would look normal.  This is a start.  Another question is, what is the right color, what colors are we trying to get with the finished picture?  Do we want what would be there is there were no hash lights?  Maybe, but the lights also provide some additional "feeling" to the scene so we do not want to remove them completely.

I think it boils down to, what colors do you want to see.  When you look at a picture the question should really be, do you like it?  Does it appeal to you?  And if it hits those marks then it is a good picture no matter what the final colors are.