Flaska Reclinata | Featured Image of the Week


the Flaska Reclinata at Disney’s Animal Kingdom

the Flaska Reclinata at Disney's Animal Kingdom

– Disney World’s newest land, Pandora – the World of Avatar, was a long time in the making but being able to see it within days of the official public opening proved that Disney Imagineers don’t take a back seat to anybody in the theme park business. I was lucky to be there during it’s opening week and while I had my doubts about an Avatar land belonging in Animal Kingdom, seeing it changed my mind. What I quickly realized was this place could only exist in Disney’s Animal Kingdom. For this week’s featured image I want to talk about a shot I took of one of the first things you see when you enter the land, the Flaska Reclinata.

Vegetation from Another Planet

Visitors enter Pandora – the World of Avatar by going over a bridge and one of the first things you see is a sign welcoming you to the Valley of Mo’ara.

The floating mountains may be the headline grabbing feature but everywhere you look in Pandora you’ll see incredible attention to detail with a landscape that really looks out-of-this-world. The mixture of real and artificial plants is so well done even the plants you know are fake make you take a second look just to be sure.

One of the first other-world plants you encounter is the gigantic Flaska Reclinata. While it’s massive size and unique look would grab your attention what really makes it unique is how it interacts with guests. I won’t spoil the surprise here but trust me when I say that it’s pretty awesome.

Photographing in Pandora

From a photography standpoint there’s a lot to love about Pandora – the World of Avatar, and it only gets better at night when everything takes on an extraterrestrial blue glow with green highlights on the walking paths and almost everywhere you look.

While this may seem like an incredible place for long exposure photography it is a bit difficult to get ground level shots without people in them. Ultimately you just need to be patient and hope for an opening long enough to grab your shot. I was extremely fortunate to have a little over a minute of time to get my night time shot of the Flaska Reclinata and the resulting shot is the one I’m featuring in this blog.

To get the shot I used my travel tripod and my Sony a6000 camera with my favorite travel lens, the Sony 16mm f2.8. My camera was set to f5.6 with an ISO of 400. For a shutter speed I captured 20 seconds. The resulting RAW image was processed using a combination of Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop.

If you’d like to see more images from my visit to Pandora during it’s public opening I have an Adobe Spark Page all about my experience here.

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