Tomorrowland

Here are a few shots I took after the Magic Kingdom was closed. I like these pictures but something seems off. If anyone has advice about how I can make these pictures better please tell me.

 

I did it again here are the pictures.

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I still haven't figured out a decent way to align horizons in Photoshop. I MUST be missing something.. there's an easy way to do it in Adobe RAW, but Photoshop itself only seems to have an arbitrary rotate by x degrees function. Or selecting the whole image and rotating it manually with the mouse, which never seemed all that ideal either.

But regarding these pictures, the thing that looks off to me is that there's too much darkness. In a way I like the look, the thing I've always loved about MK at night is that they're not afraid to leave areas in relative darkness. I love the pools of light on the walkway surrounded by the inky black abyss. Okay.. so it's not THAT dark..

It's not an easy problem to overcome.. the fact is there's only so much that a sensor can do, only so much distance between black and white (in terms of brightness, I mean). The darks in the scene are too dark, and the lights are too light. You can massage the images a bit in post processing, but really what's needed is taking multiple exposures and then combining them later using various image processing tricks that I've never really gotten the hang of. The trick is making something that really IS unrealistic look real. I don't have the knack, yet.


Is it just me, or does Tomorrowland look sad? I mean all the neon is lit, but there's nobody there..

I just love the look of Tomorrowland at night. I love all the neon, all the bright colors reflecting off other things. Overall I think it's my favorite place to be in Disney World in terms of ambiance. The second shot really captures it. The purple light reflecting off the fantastic wing-like shutters, the intense red neon below the TTA (or People Mover for the old school enthusiasts).. I'm getting all sentimental, I feel the urge to look at a calender to see how long until Mousefest.


If your version of Elements has it, experiment with the "shadow/highlight" tool, in particular the shadow slider (I find messing with the highlight slider tends to make the picture look unreal, it puts a halo around the darker objects). Shadow/Highlight can do some impressive stuff, I've been impressed by how much detail it brought out of what looked like a black scene before. But that kind of brightness change will tend to bring with it a lot of extra noise, just be aware that you don't get massive changes like that for free. To do difficult subjects like this I think you really need more than one shot's worth of dynamic range (the difference between the brightest bright and the darkest dark that the sensor can capture in one shot). This isn't a point and shoot problem, everything, including video cameras, has to deal with this.

I'm a night shot enthusiast, and I'm still working on my technique. I'd swear it was a lot easier when I was shooting black and white film.. I knew a lot less then than I did now, but I still produced some excellent pictures.