What happens when you play with your aperture settings at Disneyland!

Do you want to see what you can do at Disneyland when you spend an entire day only adjusting the aperture setting on my camera?  

That’s exactly what I did last week.  And it was a ball!  I rarely give myself the treat of simply enjoying my camera when we are on a vacation so spending an entire day only taking pictures I wanted to take was really, a vacation in and of itself!  Here’s Disneyland as seen by Sara – (and two lessons about aperture all bundled into one really long blog post!)

Lesson one:  The higher the f number, the bluer the sky:

Did you know that the bigger the f number, the bluer the sky?  It’s true!  If you want a really blue sky, use a big f number.  I set my camera aperture to f4 (I wanted to go bigger but it was so bright that I couldn’t because it was too bright) and framed these lampost flowers against the sky so I could only see the sky.  Isn’t that fun!

Look what happened here:  this time I was in a different position to the sun so I could set my aperture higher – f10.  Look how blue the sky was!  We had the best weather and I wanted that to show in my pictures.

Lesson 2:  The higher the f number, the more “sunbursty” the sun looks:

Here I really wanted to capture the geometric nature of Space Mountain – and I wanted to show the way the sun was peaking over the tower balancing out the vertical elements.  So, I positioned myself so the sun was in the very top right hand corner of my view finder and I set my camera to f22 so I could have a blue sky and a strong sunburst.  The aperture did the rest.  The high aperture created that sunburst effect.  

Here it is again:

This time I wanted the sun to mimic the sculpture.  I used f22 again to create this image. 

Finally, I wanted to incorporate all of these sunburst images with people enjoying the part…not just the architecture/scultpural elements.  So, I took advantage of my dad and Lucy riding Dumbo:

Lucy is still a little bit too short to really pull off this image!  But I like how Dumbo is flying, you can see my family, and the sun is bursting in the top corner.  Super fun!

I had so much fun photographing Disney – I could go on and on!!  But for now, I’ll just leave you with my favorites of Lucy and Luke:  (Just a note, for all of these I used as low of an f number as I could.  Usually that was around 3.2…but I tried to go lower if I could.)

Luke meets Cruella:  (In this one, f1.8 was too much light…so I used f3.2)

Lucy watches and rides the Carousel (this one was actually f3.2)

f1.8

This is my niece:  baby Abygail! (f1.8)

f1.8

(Chris took this one of Lucy on the tea cups.  Isn’t she stunning )

So here’s your homework:  Go out and have fun!  And while you are out having fun, decide what you want to capture…is it the blue sky?  Is it a sunburst?  Is it the people you love enjoying life?  Is it all three of those things together?  Then, decide if you want a high f number (blue sky, big sunburst, not a lot of blurr) or if you want a small f number (less saturated sky, no sunburst, lots of blurr).  Tell you camera what you want!  And send me your pictures.  I love seeing all of them!

Sara