It’s another year in the books and I think perhaps my best yet for quality content. I learned a lot leading up to and throughout the year. I think the biggest of these was moving a lot of my blending work away from Photomatix to manual blending using luminosity masks. I still think Photomatix is a great program and I still use it on select photos but changing the way I go about blending my images has helped me get much cleaner and realistic blends. It’s always been my goal with my images to create something that’s first of all realistic and then sprinkle that with a bit of magic. Now more than ever I feel each image I post is more or less in line with my vision. I still have things to learn however and I look forward to continuing to improve in 2016 and continuing to share more great Disney photos with all of you. As I shared yesterday my top 9 photos for 2015, as posted to Instagram, were all photos of Cinderella Castle. I thought it only made sense with that in mind to finish the year with one final shot of Cinderella Castle. This was taken this past fall and even though Castle Couture is behind scrim I still really like this shot.
Shooting/Editing The Streets to Cinderella Castle
This was shot with the Nikon D810 and Nikon 70-200 2.8. I really enjoy shooting verticals from up Main Street of Cinderella Castle the past few years. It makes the castle really fill the frame and shows it straight, tall and looming. Shooting close up and ultra wide sometimes I think you lose perspective of the size. This way you can see just how big it is in scale compared to Partners for instance. I did my standard editing but did spend some extra time dodging and burning on this one to accentuate certain areas.
Finally I just want to thank everyone for following along and here’s to another year of great Disney photos.