Dengrove Studios Blog

With summer upon us a frequent activity of mine and I’m sure many others is visiting a theme or amusement park with family and friends. The wealth of colors, sights, people, shapes, and the occasional furry bear make theme parks an excellent venue for taking some really amazing photos. However, it is important to make sure that you’re using the right settings on your camera. Not only to make sure you get a great shot, but also to make sure that you do not disturb others around you who are trying to enjoy the ride!

The idea for this article came out of a trip I recently took to Walt Disney World in Orlando, FL. More specifically while riding one of my favorite attractions, Spaceship Earth, at EPCOT. You know Spaceship Earth it’s the one that people claim looks like a “big golf ball”. In actuality it is one of the world’s largest geodesic spheres. It is while riding this iconic attraction that an incident occurred that prompted me to write this post.

Spaceship Earth at Night (f/16, 20s, ISO100)

In general, this particular blog post is aimed at anybody who will be visiting a theme park and taking photos in the near future.

However, more specifically this post is aimed at the gentleman of average-description who was sitting 4 cars behind me on June 30th, 2010 at precisely 1:34 PM in the afternoon who decided it would be a bright idea to continually use his flash approximately every 10 seconds while taking photos, thus ruining the ride for not only me, but the other 25 people around me who were all taking the “slow-moving journey through the history of civilization” that is Spaceship Earth!

I can only hope that this man is a reader of my blog, and if so, my friend, you’d better listen up because I’m talking directly to you on this one! *End of rant*

For those who don’t know, Spaceship Earth is what is known as a “dark ride”. These types of rides usually take place in some sort of a vehicle, which brings you past various scenes of a story, such as a haunted house. The key thing that some people don’t seem to fully understand is the “dark” concept.

These rides are meant to take place in the dark and often times have extremely low-light levels. Naturally, it is very difficult to take photographs under these conditions and have them come out. This, I assume, is why there are people who take photos in these “dark rides” with their flash on.

There is a better way. Let me show you some techniques that you can use on “dark rides”. Not only to help you take better photos, but also so that you’ll be able to take the photos you want without disturbing the other people around you who are also trying to enjoy the attraction.

There is also a third reason why you shouldn’t use flash on “dark rides”. This is because the photos will never look like what you see on the ride. The people who create these rides use special lighting, and projections to create all the effects that you see, and to give the scene an illusion of realism. When you take a photo your flash is so strong that often times it overpowers all of these special effects and you end up with a photo of a very fake looking mannequin.

Let me give you an example…at the very top of the Spaceship Earth ride is a beautiful projection of the planet Earth. Naturally, everyone loves to take a picture of it. And of course there is always one person who will ruin the scene with their flash.

What this person doesn’t understand is that they just took a photo of a big white nothing! You see the image of planet Earth on the ride is a digital projection, like when you watch a movie. So when you shoot your flash at it, it ends up being so bright that it drowns out the projector and all you get is a photo of a blank white screen.

Image of Earth (f/1.8, 1/10s, 1600 ISO)

Image of Earth taken with Flash

As you can see from the images above clearly the flash doesn’t work in this type of situation, and all you have done is upset the other riders around you. So how can we get a nice photo of the Earth projection or any other scene in a “dark ride”? The first step is to turn off the flash! Every camera has a way of doing this, usually you should look for this symbol on your camera. This is where you can change the flash setting on your camera to OFF .

Once you have your flash off, there are some other settings on your camera that need to be “tweaked”. You’ll want to increase your ISO. We’ve talked briefly about ISO before. ISO is the setting that controls how sensitive to light the sensor on your digital camera is. If you’re using a film camera the ISO is determined by the type of film you place in your camera. The higher the ISO that you use, the more sensitive it makes your camera to light an therefore makes it easier to take photos in low-light.

Great so let’s crank our ISO setting to full blast and take some “dark ride” photos. Wait just a minute, it’s not quite as simple as that. You see although increasing the ISO makes our cameras more sensitive to the light coming through the lens, it has a very detrimental side effect that we must take into account.

Increasing the ISO also increases the amount of noise in your photo. This means that if you set your ISO too high your photo will turn into a big grainy, noisy mess. What’s worse is you won’t realize this until you download the photos to your computer, because on your cameras tiny little screen everything looks sharp and clear.

Spaceship Earth Scene with ISO set too high

Fear not though, today’s modern digital cameras can usually use ISO settings as high as 1200-1800 without showing any noise at all. In addition, camera manufacturers are pushing the ISO envelope all the time, creating better and better sensors that can take high ISO’s without showing any noise at all. Just this year 2 of the major camera manufacturers came out with cameras whose maximum ISO settings are over 100,000!

Changing our ISO will allow us to take better photos without flash, but what other settings do we need to know about when taking photos on “dark rides”? As you know, in nearly all “dark rides” there is some sort of movement or vehicle that you travel in, this is the “ride” part of the “dark ride”. When you leave your camera on it’s automatic settings it wants to slow down your shutter speed so that it can allow the most light possible into your camera.

Your camera’s shutter speed controls how long the sensor or film in your camera is exposed to light. Slowing the shutter speed down will allow more light to enter your camera because the shutter is open for a longer period of time which makes for better photos. There’s only one problem, when you combine a slow shutter with the movement of a “dark ride”, you get blur. Basically your photos would be a big blurry mess if you simply used your camera’s automatic settings on a “dark ride”

In order to correct this, we must tell the camera which shutter speed we’d like it to use. This way we can pick one that’s slow enough to be able to take decent photos in low-light but still fast enough so that you don’t get any blur from the moving ride vehicle. To do this we must put the camera into Shutter-Priority Mode, or S-Mode. You should be aware that not all cameras have an S-Mode setting on them. For those that don’t you can usually use either a “Night Mode” setting or “Portrait Mode” setting on your camera. These modes limit how slow the shutter speed will get so you can prevent or eliminate blur.

For those of you with cameras that have a Shutter-Priority Mode I would recommend using a shutter speed of 1/15 – 1/30 of a second. I find that setting is usually sufficient to get a nicely exposed photo while eliminating blur. If you’re not sure what kind of settings your camera has, consult with your owner’s manual to see if it has an S-Mode setting, and to see what other exposure presets it may contain.

Some digital cameras today come with over 15 programmed exposure modes. With everything from a “beach” to a “fireworks” setting there should be one offered on your camera that will allow you to limit your shutter speed. For more information about S-Mode you can click here to view our previous blog post about it.

Properly exposed scene without flash (ISO 1600, 1/10s, f/2.8)

As you can see from the above photo when you combine a high ISO with the proper shutter speed you can walk away with a great photo of any “dark ride” without using your flash, just as the designers intended the scene to look. And more importantly, without disturbing your fellow riders! So the next time you find yourself at Epcot, riding on Spaceship Earth, I beg you, please keep in mind what we’ve discussed here today. Not only will it help you take better photos, but as you can see Mr. average description gentleman sitting 4 cars behind me, I might just be the one who is on the receiving end of your flash bursts.

We’ve been talking quite a bit about technique lately, so I thought we might take a break from that and talk a bit more about digital photography in general and what to look for when buying a new camera. This one is aimed more at the beginner to intermediate crowd.

So you’re in the market for a new digital camera? It seems everyone is these days and there are more choices than ever! So how do you choose the one that’s right for you?

The first question you need to ask yourself is what type of shooter are you? Are you looking for something small and compact that you can throw in a purse or a pocket for just general use, or are you looking for a more professional camera with interchangeable lenses?

There are 2 main categories of digital cameras point and shoots and SLRs (Single Lens Reflex). Point and shoots are aimed more at everyday photographers who stay on Automatic settings most of the time and simply want to be able to quickly pull out a tiny camera from their bag and click off a few photos. SLRs are aimed more at the intermediate to advanced crowd that wants the ultimate control over their photos.

Point and Shoot Camera (Nikon Coolpix S570)

SLR Camera (Nikon D90)

In today’s digital camera market the line between these 2 categories is actually becoming rather blurred as new hybrids come out all the time such as the new “Pen” type cameras that have the body of a point and shoot but can use interchangeable lenses like an SLR. Not to mention the fact that a lot of digital cameras can also take HD Video that rivals some video cameras.

Once you have decided what category of camera you’d like to buy there are still a number of different features to consider. The first thing everyone asks when looking at a new camera is “How many megapixels is it?” But, do megapixels really matter, and just what is a megapixel anyway?

When your digital camera takes an image it is made up of millions of very small dots. Each one of these dots is called a pixel. Mega means million, so if you have a digital camera that shoots at 8 megapixels, that means the camera is capable of taking an image made up of 8 million pixels! That’s a lot of dots, so just how many do you actually need, and is more better?

Digital Images are made up of pixels (Photo courtesy of pixelkids.org)

Well as it turns out the importance of megapixels really comes into play only if you are printing your digital images. You see all websites and computer screens display images at a very low resolution. An average image that you see on your computer screen is only made up of a couple hundred thousand pixels.

Wait? only a couple hundred thousand pixels to show an image on a screen? Yes, that’s what I said, so if you’re the type of shooter that mostly displays their images on a digital device such as a computer, tv, ipod, or digital photo frame and doesn’t do a lot of printing of images, then getting a high megapixel camera will most-likely be a waste of money for you!

Even if you’re the type of shooter that prints every image they take you still probably don’t need all of those megapixels. An 8×10 printed image actually only contains about 7.2 million pixels, so even if you’d like to blow up that cute picture you took of your dog to an 8×10 you would still only need an 8 megapixel camera!

Then why is everyone so obsessed with megapixels? It’s just one of those industry numbers that everyone has heard of so they want you to think more megapixels = better images = buy this camera! Now if you’re looking to print larger photos such as 11×14, 16×20 or even posters, than sure go out and buy that 10, 12, or 14 megapixel camera, but if you’re only printing smaller photos or not printing at all and only sharing online then you can save yourself quite a bit of money when buying a new camera.

What else should you look for when buying a new digital camera? One feature that I highly recommend is optical zoom. Be careful not to confuse this with digital zoom. What is optical zoom? Optical zoom means that when using the zoom function to get closer to your subject the lens actually moves and that is what makes the image appear larger.

This is different from digital zoom, which is when the computer in your camera does the zooming in order to make your subject larger. This can cause your photos to be less sharp and will reduce the resolution of the photo.

Some cameras use a combination of both optical and digital zoom to make your subject larger. Try to look for a camera that has just optical zoom or both optical and digital. Stay away from cameras that only have digital zoom. You will get much cleaner and sharper photos from an optically zoomed image.

Digital vs. Optical Zoom (photo courtesy of bobatkins.com)

Another feature you want to look for in your digital camera is how well it will perform in low-light. This is super important because what you consider to be a low-light situation is very different from what your camera considers to be low-light.

This is because the human eye can see much better than any camera ever invented. Our eyes have no problem seeing a person perfectly clear in a dimly lit room or even by candle-light.

Your camera on the other hand can sometimes have trouble seeing clearly. Even when it is in what a human might consider a reasonably well-lit room.

Try to take a photo by candlelight and you’re likely to wind up with a blurry mess if your camera doesn’t have the right features! Now of course you could always turn on your flash, but that would ruin the mood wouldn’t it.

What you need to shoot low-light photos is a camera with a very fast lens. When purchasing a point and shoot camera or even a lens for an SLR camera you want to look for one that can open very wide to let the most amount of light in. This is called the aperture of the lens. Being this is an article aimed at beginners I’m not going to get very technical about the aperture here, to learn more about it you can view our previous blog post, A-Mode, Would You Like Your Depth of Field Deep or Shallow.

How do you know if a camera has a fast lens and will perform well in low-light? You need to make sure the camera or lens has a wide aperture. The size of the aperture is measured in f-stops. So it will look something like this “f/4″.

Or it may be written as a range if it’s a zoom lens such as “f/3.5-5.6″. Or possibly it may be written in an abbreviated format such as “1:3.5-8″. Either way, you should  look for a camera whose lens’ smallest number  is f/2.8 or smaller. So if you see a smaller number such as f/1.4 or f/1.8 that would work as well.

Having a camera with a fast lens (wide aperture) will allow you to capture much better images in low-light while other people without a fast lens will have to use their flash to get the same results.

The largest aperture size on this lens is f/3.5 which means it won't perform well in very low-light you want to look for f/2.8 or smaller

To summarize, we have reviewed a few things that you should keep an eye out for when shopping for a new digital camera. Cameras today have all sorts of bells, whistles, and especially features. They come in every size, color, shape, and price. It is not as important who makes your new camera, as it is that it has the particular features that you are looking for.

We were only able to cover a few in this article, as covering them all would require me to write a book, but I hope I’ve given you some things to look out for, and some options to consider.

If you have any questions or would like some further advice on purchasing your new digital camera please feel free to post a comment or get in touch with us.