Sunday, October 30, 2016

Rivers of America in the Magic Kingdom

Three Themes, One Shot




Rivers of America is the name of the artificial river that encircles Tom Sawyer Island in the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World.  In the Magic Kingdom, Rivers of America passes by both Frontierland as well as Liberty Square.

Did you know that there were actually two riverboats sailing in Rivers of America.  In the late 1970s, one of them got damaged during a storm.  Did you also know that the Liberty Belle runs on a track.  I guess that's why sometimes they let guests steer the boat from the wheelhouse.

I like this shot because of the contrast between Harper's Mill representing Frontierland.  In the middle you can see Liberty Square.  Then in the background you can see Cinderella Castle.

I wanted to go a little overboard with this shot so I started with a three bracket HDR image that I merged in Adobe Lightroom.  When with the single merged image, I applied some rather heavy HDR post-processing using HDR Efex Pro 2 which is a free plug-in that is part of the Nik Collection from Google.

For the normal exposure the settings were aperture f/8.0, 1/100 sec shutter speed, ISO 100 and 50mm focal length (1.5x crop).

Have fun capturing the magic of Disney.