We had heard about the “Disney’s a Christmas Carol” train tour a month of so ago and were quite pleased to hear that it was coming to Ogden, UT (complete schedule), which is only about an hour from my house. I took off from work about an hour early, but when we got there we found out it was a three hour wait and then an hours worth of activities. We didn’t think our two year old was up to the wait, but we still managed to get some nice shots of the train and the inflatable theatre. Full sized versions of the shots below are available over in the gallery.

Your fresh Saturday delivery of links and flickr love. Remember, most of this stuff shows up on Twitter first!

• I’d never really noticed what the cards Esmerelda uses in the Penny Arcade have on them, but nuala29 did [flickr]
• If you are a fan of the Disney channel or ABC you’ll be happy to know that Disney has inked a deal with hulu.com to deliver Disney/ABC content on their fast growing site. [thewrap.com]
• In other hulu.com news, you can now get hulu content on your XBOX 360 or PS3 via the brand new version of tversity. Not really Disney related, but sure is cool. [tversity.com]
• Mickey News asks the question “Could ‘Flash Mountain’ return, in light of Disneyland job cuts?” Get your cameras ready folks. [mickeynews.com]
• Check out some beautiful HDR shots of Disneyland Paris here and here from flickr user Era. [flickr]
• And here is a bit of self promotion on my part. I finally posted up my 84 shot pano of the Court of Angels at Disneyland, but I did it under my personal account so you could see it in high res goodness. [flickr]
• And a little bit more self promotion. I have a couple of shots from Disneyland up on my Etsy store available in very nice 11 x 14 prints.

Keep an eye out this week for a post on what kind of ride shots you can take if your camera just isn’t quite fast enough. It’s run and abstract all at the same time.

Hmmm. It seems I screwed the gallery up a little bit making some changes earlier this week and didn’t notice until today. So if you’ve been over there and seen just a blank white page, it should be fixed now. Sorry about that!

Happy Wednesday! Just wanted to get a quick update posted regarding some site news and a couple of great links:

• DisneySpeak is now on Twitter! Most of our updates are about Disney related new or  great Disney photography. Some of the links will probably filter back to the blog eventually, but the cutting edge stuff will show up on Twitter first. I mentioned this in another post, but we actually have a link button on the sidebar over on the right now, and a couple of good links in the Twitter feed.
• We’ve created a couple of new groups over on flickr:
  • Asleep at Disneyland- For pictures of people that actually manage to fall asleep at The Happiest Place on Earth.
  • Disneyland Rides and Queues - Pictures of all the great rides and their equally great queues.
  • Disneyland Stores and Shops - Some of the Stores and Shops at Disneyland are almost as well themed as the rides. Post pictures of them here.
• I have just under 300 images ready to upload to the site in addition to the 30 or 40 that have been uploaded over the last couple days. Still have a whole day left of vacation images to process.

Speaking of Twitter, here are some great links from our feed:

• The entire east and west sides of main street in two panoramas by DisneyKrayzie on flickr.
• A great Walt Disney World photoset by flickr user Jeff B.
• About every six months I see an article or blog post about how Disney “recycled” scenes from older movies into new films. Apparently it has popped up again via twitter user BradleySager.
  

Have you ever gotten back from Disneyland and looked through your photos and just found snapshot after snapshot? Nothing stands out and they all look like all the other pictures you and millions of other people have taken? What you need is a photography refresh. Here are a couple ideas to get you back in the game:

• Rent a new lens from somewhere like http://www.lensrentals.com/. Make sure to get something interesting though, like a super wide angle lens, a macro lens or a LensBaby and then try looking at the park in a whole new way.
• Shoot the entire day with one of your lenses you don’t use a bunch. One day this trip I shot only with my brothers 70-250 mm lens and it very interesting how different you see things.
• Shoot something different in the park. Try taking only pictures of flowers or of signs. Try focusing on the inside of shops. Shoot all of the food you eat. Just try and get out of your comfort zone.
• Shoot at night. Take a tripod into the park and do long exposures of the lights and people. Let this be a starting point for inspiration.
• Try shooting HDR shots. Your going to need a tripod again probably (although if it’s light enough out you can try using your continuous shot mode.) 
• Shoot panoramas. The image at the top is six shots stitched together. There are tons of locations in the park that make for great panoramas: the castle up close, from Tarzan’s Tree House, or Tom Sawyers Island. Walk the park with this in mind and a lot of places will jump out at you. 
• Go all out. Don’t just “take pictures at Disneyland”. Take great pictures at Disneyland. Dedicate an hour or two (or a day) to just taking pictures at the park. Look for the artistic shot, the dramatic shot. These are the pictures that people that aren’t into Disney parks are going to look at and be impressed with because they go past vacation pictures into the realm of really great photography. Check out Express Monorail on flickr for inspiration.

Any other suggestions for getting our of the snapshot zone when shooting at Disney parks? Let me know in the comments.

When you take pictures in a dark place with a high ISO setting - like you are pretty much forced to do to take pictures on most Disney rides - you are going to end up with noise in your pictures. At smaller sizes this isn’t such a big deal, but if you want to view them larger or print them out, noise can become a pretty large issue. Fortunately, there is software designed to take care of this issue that does a really great job of smoothing out the noise without you loosing a lot of detail.

The images above are closeup shots of the skeletons hat from the large image up top. If you look at the image on the left, you can see how there is a lot of noise present in both the green bandanna and the background. The image on the right has been run through a noise reduction Photoshop plugin called Noise Ninja, and as you can see a lot of the noise has been smoothed out, without a lot of detail being lost. This works great not only on ride shots, but also any shot where you have a lot of one color, like a very blue sky. I would say on average, I probably do noise reduction on probably 75% of all photos I shoot.

As I mentioned above, the software I use for this is called Noise Ninja (available at http://www.picturecode.com/). They have versions for home users as cheap as $34.95, but I like the pro bundle pack at $79.95, as it allows you to process all the images in a directory automatically, which is great for when I’ve taken hundreds of shots at the park. There are also many other software packages that do the same thing, including:

• Neat Image - Starting at $29.90 (http://www.neatimage.com/)
• Dfine 2.0 - $99.95 (http://www.niksoftware.com/dfine/usa/entry.php)
• Built in noise reduction in Photoshop and Lightroom (and quite possibly Photoshop Elements)

I use Noise Ninja because for me it’s the least complicated and I get great results, but a lot of people are very happy with the software above, and there are many more applications available, just do a Google search for “noise reduction software”. Regardless of how you do it, your images are guaranteed to look better.

Yesterday/this morning we uploaded another 120+ pictures to the gallery. We are starting to get a pretty good spread of shots throughout both parks, but there is still a ton of work left to do. The Enchanted Tiki Room currently has far more pictures than pretty much anywhere else in the park and I know there are a ton more.

I also changed the license on all our pictures over at flickr to Attribution-NonCommercial Creative Commons. Essentially that means that you are welcome to do whatever you want with them as long as you don’t make money off of them and you link back to the picture in some way. At some point I’ll probably do the same thing with the images hosted here, but for now you’ll have to make do with what is on flickr until I can get it all figured out. If you need a higher resolution version of any of the images, please just let me know.

When I was at Disneyland last week, I took 87 shots of the “Court of Angels” in New Orleans Square all from the same location with the intention of making a huge panorama. It turned out pretty cool and as soon as I have a couple minutes to refine it a bit I’ll post it up. I took the same images and threw them into the Microsoft Photosynth creator, which makes these awesome 3D viewable panoramas using… magic I assume. You’ll need to install the plugin and then go here to check it out.

The power of something like this at a place like Disneyland almost boggles the mind. If I turned around, I could have easily captured the entire courtyard in under 200 shots. Think about applying this to something like the castle though. It would take more shots, but it is completely possible that you could see the entire exterior of the castle in 3D, from all angles. I’m going to need a bigger flash card.

I’ve just finished uploading the first handful of images from my recent vacation up to the gallery. Still have well over 1000 to go, everyone at DisneySpeak HQ is sick though, so things are going a bit slower than hoped.

We also created a flickr account for the site today if you prefer to get your DisneySpeak goodness that way. It’s not a pro account, so images won’t be posted as quickly, but they’ll all get up eventually. There is also an associated DisneySpeak group that will eventually house pictures that everyone uploads here.

Speaking of uploading, we would love it if you could help add to our photo collection. This feature is new so there are probably going to be a few bumps, but email us at disneyspeak@gmail.com if you are interested. Check out the Photos We Need page for the starting list of photos we are looking for (although really all photos you can upload are awesome!)

And finally, we also have a twitter feed were we will post updates, interesting links and the like. I think FaceBook will probably follow soon.

I just got back from Disneyland and after taking hundreds of ride shots there over the past 2 years, I think I’ve finally got it down to a science. Although it is possible that you can take great shots on your DSLR with your kit lens, I’m really going to suggest you buy a new one.

• If you shoot Canon, you want this one: Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 Lens
• If you shoot Nikon, you want this one: Nikon 50mm f/1.8D AF
• If you shoot something else, what you are looking for is a 50mm prime lens. A prime lens does not have any zoom at all, it only shoots at 50mm. This enables it to shoot far faster than the zoom lens that came with your camera. Make sure that it’s minimum f-stop is f/1.8 or smaller.

I’ve had one of these lenses for my Canon for a little more than a year now, and I probably shoot with it about 25% of the time when I’m just out shooting. It’s great for shooting indoors where the light isn’t great, and the depth of field at f/1.8 is beautiful. You can literally get an inch of your subject in focus and have the rest blurry with beautiful bokeh.

That being said, I shoot probably 90% of my shots at Disneyland with this lens. It’s great because I don’t have to switch lenses before I shoot every ride, and it’s incredibly light, so it doesn’t weigh down my camera all day. It also takes very, very sharp pictures and is fairly cheap to replace if I accidentilly bash it against something or drop it.

Finally, if you don’t want to drop the cash on  a new lens, you can probably make do with the lenses you have. Check and see which of your lenses have the lowest f-stop. In a kit lens, this is probably going to be about f/3.5 on your 18-55 mm lens. Unfortunately, you are only going to get f/3.5 when you have it zoomed all the way out to 18 mm, which means all of your shots are going to be at a very wide angle. There are a couple rides that you might be able to get away with going to a higher f-stop, but in general you want the smallest f-stop possible.

So know tha that you know what you need, here is how to use it:

• Set your camera to manual mode (usually the M on the dial.) Don’t worry if you have no idea how to shoot in manual, this is going to be really easy.
• Set your shutter speed to 1/50 of a second. Any slower than than and the subjects of your photo are going to be blurry due to the movement of the rides and the anamitronics.
• If your max ISO on your camera is 1600, set it to 800. If it’s higher than that, you may have to experiment a bit, but generally you are good up to 3200-6400.)
• Set your f-stop to 2.5.

Now get in line and start shooting. As you go through the ride, make sure to review your shots as you take them. If they are coming out to dark, start by increasing your ISO then decreasing your f-stop. If you are getting blown out highlights, decrease your f-stop until you aren’t loosing detail in the hightlights. Because different part of each ride are going to have different light levels, you are probably going to have to make the above adjustments multiple times throughout each ride. Before you go, make sure that you can change your f-stop and ISO in manual mode in the dark, practice in this case does make perfect.

Once you are off the ride, take a look at the pictures you just shot. Most cameras have a feature where you can look at the image you shot along with the details (shutter speed, f-stop, ISO, etc.) See which settings worked and which ones didn’t so that next time you ride that ride you will be prepared with your camera set to the right settings before you get there. Delete anything that is blurry or very over or underexposed, you’ll want the space later in the day.

Finally, make sure to reset your camera to the mode you normally shoot in outdoors and set your ISO back down to 100. Nothing is worse that realizing that all the shots you took of your family in front of the castle are grainy and overexposed because you are still shooting with your ride settings. Trust me, I know.