Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Moana at Aulani - A Disney Resort



I haven't posted in a while since I was on vacation at Aulani, in Oahu, Hawaii.  What a fantastic place.  One of the special things they do is to have storytelling time with "Uncle" and Moana by the firepit at sunset.  The setting is simply spectacular.
This was an interesting shot to get and quite frankly I surprised myself.  I had to do this shot handheld since because of the other guests it was not practical to use a tripod.  That and Moana tends to move around a lot.

I had set the ISO to 100 earlier that day and I forgot to bump it up a bit as it got dark.  Since I was doing this handheld, from a light perspective alone, I set the aperture to f/2.8.  This caused the camera to set the shutter speed to 1/80 sec.   I also forgot to change the meter to spot metering to meter on Moana, and the metering was set to center average.  Hence, the original unedited image has the foreground somewhat dark and teh background a little over exposed.  

This just shows where the Sony A6000 shines.  After getting the image in Lightroom, I brought up the exposure by almost a 1/2 a stop, the took the shadows to 100 to bring up the foreground and then took the highlights down by 100 to bring up the detail in the background.

A little bit of tone mapping and other tweaking and this is what I ended up with.  Also noteworthy is that I applied no noise reduction at all.

Have fun capturing the magic of Disney.