Cinderella Castle Fountain Fisheye – The Remake

July 17, 2018 0 comment

Pillage and Plunder

July 16, 2018 0 comment

Into the Belly of Monstro

July 12, 2018 0 comment

Sunset Between the Joshua Tree

July 7, 2018 0 comment

Floating Mountains of Pandora

July 4, 2018 0 comment

French Connection

July 2, 2018 0 comment
Enchanted Adventureland
Disney

Enchanted Adventureland

by Matthew Cooper
written by Matthew Cooper

This simple shot of the Enchanted Tiki Room and Adventureland was somewhat painful to shoot. I was doing 3 shot brackets and had 6 in a row of kids running through the scene with the multi-color laser swords. In all I took twelve total shots and used three; two for masking and one for highlight control. Lately, I’ve been utilizing the Adobe Landscape color mode as a starting point for my photos. This color profile gets me much closer to what I’m going for with my images, so I end up having to do less massaging to get to my final image. Hooray for evolving technology…

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Cars Land Route 66
Disney

Cars Land Route 66

by Matthew Cooper
written by Matthew Cooper

I only spent a couple hours total shooting in Cars Land during my one and only Disneyland trip, but I could see myself spending days shooting just this land. There’s so many details and so many possibilities for shots it’s truly overwhelming. With that in mind I opted to get what I felt were staple type shots. This Route 66 sign composition utilizes 3 shots. 2 for blending an additional shot to eliminate people in the frame. I spaced them out a few minutes and fortunately even with the park open was able to get this empty park shot with only 2 shots for masking!

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Tree of Moon Life
Disney

Tree of Moon Life

by Matthew Cooper
written by Matthew Cooper
This shot was on my short mental list of shots to get on our most recent trip. The moon lining up the way it did was a happy coincidence. The waterfall area I found to be quite dark, so I opted to bump my ISO from its base of 64 to 200 for a 30 second exposure. This helped expose this area nicely and noise is still negligible. I skipped any sort of bracket blending and used this single exposure for the final image. I want to take a moment to mention too the amazing utility of the RRS L Bracket I use on my cameras. I don’t shoot a ton of verticals but every single time I do I’m so thankful at how easy using an l bracket makes it. Enjoy.
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Pretty in Pink
Disney

Pretty in Pink

by Matthew Cooper
written by Matthew Cooper
I was getting the itch to work on some more Disneyland shots and this one stood out to me while scrolling through my library. I ended up using 3 shots for the final edit of this photo, with the 2 extras being used exclusively for the upper half of Sleeping Beauty castle. These 2 photos I color balanced different from my base layer to get the rich pink color that is appropriate to how it looks in person. I see a lot of photos of Sleeping Beauty castle with blown out highlights or washed out color but it’s easy to control if you take the time to get a shot specifically for the upper half, edit it separately, and then mask in to your base layer.
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Joshua Tree Thermodynamics
Travel

Joshua Tree Thermodynamics

by Matthew Cooper
written by Matthew Cooper

A little detour today away from the Disney parks and into Joshua Tree National Park. On my drive out to Disneyland last year we stopped off at numerous National Parks where I took tons of photos that have mostly sat unprocessed. I’ve been going through those and figured it was time to start mixing in some of the ones I’ve finished. This was taken near our camping spot at Arch Rock in the park at sunset. Enjoy.

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Port of Harambe
Disney

Port of Harambe

by Matthew Cooper
written by Matthew Cooper
As mentioned before I haven’t shot Animal Kingdom a lot in the past but on my most recent trip I did get a decent number of shots from areas I previously had never shot. This one of Harambe I especially loved with the dusk lighting. I love how there’s just a faint amount of light in the sky and think it goes beautifully with the hanging lights. The biggest challenge of this shot is the spot lights on the two Festival of the Lion King signs. Those suckers are super hot, being slightly blown out even on shorter exposures.
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Beauty and the Beast in the French Style
Disney

Beauty and the Beast in the French Style

by Matthew Cooper
written by Matthew Cooper

Immediately after shooting Illuminations from behind Belle and the Beast I took this shot from the front. The unexpected side effect is the smoke from the fireworks was still drifting past and created this awesome atmosphere in the photo. Later photos taken in the same area after the smoke had cleared seamed almost boring in comparison. I kept the exposure low, which combined with the misty look in the air I thought created a great romantic mood, perfect for Belle and Beast. In conclusion, I wonder what Disney security would think about my own personal smoke generator in my camera bag – lol.

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Livin the Buzz Life
Disney

Livin the Buzz Life

by Matthew Cooper
written by Matthew Cooper

Our day at the Flower & Garden Festival this year was a very overcast day. While this gives you flat lighting it often means the backgrounds suck because the sky is an ugly grey. This meant I mostly stuck to my Nikon 70-200 2.8 (a lens I should use more anyway) to create tighter framings and compress the frame on some sort of interesting background. Here’s one of the Buzz Lightyear topiary against Mission Space with the grey sky mostly eliminated. The flat lighting from the overcast sky does look pretty great on Buzz I think. Enjoy.

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