– This week began with me taking a few days off to celebrate the birthday of my girlfriend Deb. Since I didn’t have the time to put together a detailed Featured Image of the Week I’m posting a quick picture from my last trip to Walt Disney World Resort.
Recently I watched the brilliant 10 part documentary about Vietnam by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick and, like every documentary I watch from them, I had a completely different feeling about a memorial I’ve been visiting for almost a decade. The documentary was difficult at times but it was definitely worth the effort. I’ll truly never look at the marble wall of names the same way again.
While the war in Vietnam is certainly a questionable time for our country there’s no denying the power of the memorial to the veterans of the war. Seeing all those names puts a real human cost to war and it makes visiting this special place on the National Mall is a requirement when traveling to Washington, DC. In this Featured Image of the Week article I’ll share a few more images and some tips and tricks I use when I photograph the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
– for this week’s Featured Image of the week I want to combine two of my favorite things, travel photography and long exposure photography, and talk about the delicate balance between getting a shot and enjoying a vacation. The image is of the beautiful London Eye and, as much as I love the shot, it does demonstrate why it’s so hard to capture every shot you might dream up when you go on a trip.
– 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.
– After my appearance on the Resort Loop podcast I listened to the show and one thing I said really stood out to me. Bob Coller Asked me how many pictures I take on a typical Disney World visit and I answered by saying: “Between 3,000 and 4,000 pictures“. Even though I know how I arrived at those numbers I realized I must have sounded crazy to anyone listening to the show. Since I have both photographers and non-photographers who follow me on this blog I thought today’s Featured Image of the Week would be a good chance to explain how and why I take as many vacation/travel pictures. This HDR image of the Tree of Life (at Disney’s Animal Kingdom) is a great way to explain what happens to some of the many pictures I take whenever I’m traveling.
– Recently I was a guest on the Resort Loop podcast where we talked about photography in Disney Parks. Of course, any time the subjects of Disney and photography are brought up it never takes long until someone asks about photographing fireworks. On the podcast I talked about my personal tricks to getting fireworks shots inside Disney Parks, but an audio podcast doesn’t always tell the entire story (especially when the topic is so visual, like photography).
For this week’s Featured Image of the week I wanted to share a picture and some behind the scenes information about how I like to capture great Disney World fireworks shots.
– For this weeks Featured Image of the Week I wanted to share a shot from my most recent visit to Disney World. Disney’s newest land, Pandora – the Land of Avatar, was officially opened to the public and I made my first visit almost immediately. I was blown away with the new land in the daytime – but at night the Floating Mountain looked absolutely incredible. Unfortunately, getting photos anywhere in Pandora at night is tricky but after a little trail and error I was able to find a combination that would give me a good starting point to work from. The rest was taken care of in Lightroom and Photoshop. In this article I’ll share what made night time photography in Pandora so tricky – and my solutions.
For this week’s Featured Image of the Week I went back to Paris and found a long exposure shot that I really liked (and I haven’t shared this image anywhere online yet). I loved the composition of the shot – but I did have a big problem that needed to be solved. To find out more about this shot (and how to create images like this for yourself) be sure to read the entire article.
For this weeks Featured Image of the week I’m sharing a picture of the 2017 total Solar Eclipse (as seen from Charleston, SC). Getting the shot was a combination of having the right gear, being in the right place and a whole lot of luck. If seeing how I got the shot (including the equipment and settings I used) is something you’re interested in then be sure to read the entire article.
Today’s Featured Image of the Week is one I shot in London of Elizabeth Tower – or what we sometimes call “Big Ben”. Yesterday I learned that it was going to be undergoing a massive four year refurbishment. I was lucky enough to see it in person in 2016 and I thought it was absolutely awesome. I can’t imagine it looking any better from the outside – but in four years I’m planning to return so I can see how it looks after all the work is done. In this article I’ll talk a bit about the equipment I used and the settings I chose to get the shot.