Cinderella Castle, I’ve shot it so many times and so many different ways I’ve lost count but I still keep coming back for more. And now with the new ramps and turrets it’ll help mix it up even more. Unfortunately this past trip they were still doing work on the front side of the castle and on Castle Couture in the rear that limited some of the options for shooting it. Using this angle I was able to avoid the scrim on Castle Couture and feature what is my favorite side of the castle anyway, without any signs of construction. I’ve shot the backside with plenty of clear skies over the year so I actually like the bit of interesting cloud action I got for this shot. It mixes things up if nothing else.
For this shot I once again shot 2 separate brackets as there was still a bit of foot traffic here while I was shooting so I needed the additional shots to mask out the ghosted people. I of course shot with the Nikon 14-24 at ISO 64 and F8, which is the sharpest aperture for the lens. I ended up using 3 of those shots to create my ghost free base layer and then used a single additional exposure blended with a luminosity mask to fine tune the highlights. I then applied some color balancing and minor levels adjustments along with some saturation adjustments. I used my own special mix of Nik Color Efex plugins as I often do and finished it off with some selective denoising using Imagenomic’s Noiseware plugin for the sky. I also did two sharpening passes, one smart sharpen, and one highpass, which I do as I like my images to be sharp as a knife. Hopefully all these little bits of info give you some insight into how I go about getting the results that I do. Enjoy.
