The story of this photo has become more of a tale likened to that of Homer’s Iliad than a simple little photographic explanation.
It began a few months ago with an idea for taking identical late night and early morning panoramic shots of the Partners Statue and Castle with no people in the frame. The plan was to wait until both of the Purple Trumpet trees behind the Partners Statue were in full bloom and have a photo filled with flowers and color. After several trips to Disneyland to see how the trees were progressing it became painfully obvious that the tree on the left was not going to bloom at all and the one on the right was nearing the end of its bloom. I had to move quickly before I lost all the flowers and would have to wait another year.
I also had to devise a plan to get the shot first thing in the morning with no people in the frame. We picked a day with no Magic Morning Hours and made reservations for the Minnie & Friends Character Breakfast at Plaza Inn 20 minutes before rope drop. This was the only way to get around the rope before everyone else and get my elusive dream shot. We went up the day before to figure out exactly where I needed to stand and what the camera settings would have to be for this 6 image panorama. We stayed at Paradise Pier so I could easily be the last person in the park the night before to get my night time version and the first person in the park the next morning. Since I was now into this adventure $350.00 for the room and the breakfast, I put so much pressure on myself to get the morning shot that I only got 1 hour of sleep the night before.
So the sun rises and I am at the first person at the entry gates at 7:30 am (even though they open at 8:30 that day) and all is well. The sky is starting to clear from the morning clouds and is looking good. We use our separate entrance for the character breakfast people and are taken around the crowd at the end of Main St. over to Plaza Inn. I see my opening and bolt for the hub. I know I only have about 30 seconds to get the shot before security is on me. There was no way I could set up a tripod to do HDR brackets, so I just had to take single images and change the exposure later. Right as I get to the last frame, here he comes. "You aren’t allowed to be up here and need to go back to Main St." He was very nice, let me take my last shot and wished me a magical day. At this point, I’m starving, exhausted and trembling from so little sleep and too much caffeine. Having a giant breakfast filled with tasty goodies and fat laden pork products was exactly what I needed and it fixed me right up.
Now comes the expensive part. My intention is to blow this image up and have it printed on a stretch canvas at 24" X 48", so I know it has to be perfect. Unfortunately, the original panorama was terrible. It had a blown out sky on the right, cast members walking through the scene, horrible fringing in the trees and most importantly, no flowers on the left tree. I took each RAW file and changed the exposures to -2, -1, 0, +1, +2 to run each section as a 5 exposure HDR. Of course, my 7 year old computer didn’t have enough memory to do this and was already maxed out on what it can take. Luckily the owner of the computer company down the walkway is a friend, so he built me a custom computer for the cost of parts only. That way I could get top of the line parts and have a screamingly fast new system for the same price as buying a package at the store. There went another $1,200.00. MONEY WELL SPENT! And in usual computer fashion, I had to upgrade from XP to Windows 7 and my programs weren’t compatible. There went more money.
A few days later, the computer is done, new programs installed and I’m ready to go. I run my HDR and don’t like it, so I do a 5 exposure Exposure Fusion. I don’t like that one either so I merge each of the HDR images with the Exposure Fusion images into 6 gigantic 16 bit Tiff files and then make the Panorama out of them.
Now comes the really tedious part. I reversed the image and layered the flowered tree on top of the one without flowers and painstakingly painted in some of them, weaving branches from each tree together for a realistic look. Then I had to stretch the center portion of the sky out to get rid of the blown out right side and wires behind the castle. Using a 3 pixel brush I painted the sky around every single leaf on every tree as well as every other little detail. This actually worked well because it gave me the ability to eliminate the blue and red fringing on the branches and really cleaned up the trees. After that came the task of getting rid of the 6 Cast Members, one of which was wearing a bright pink hoodie and there was a neon green jacket hanging on a cart. Once I thought the image was finished, I decided to blow it up 600% and go through every square inch of it looking for flaws. The problem with looking for flaws at the pixel level is you find them… lots of them. Every single brick around the statue had green fringing on the edges, so that had to be cleaned up, one brick at a time as well as any other fringing I found along the railings, benches and what have you.
Once again, I thought I was finished until I started noticing problems where the 6 images were stitched together. It started with the stem of an umbrella that was broken in the middle and looked funny. Then I noticed a bench didn’t line up properly, and another bench and the brick benches beside the castle were messed up. There was a part at the top of the castle where the roof was drooping a little and worst of all was the base of the Partners Statue was all screwed up as well as the one Donald was on. All of those had to be rebuilt and straightened, pixel by pixel.
I’m now into this image over $1,700.00 and at least 40 hours of work in Photoshop. I know there will be more minor adjustments before I get it printed, but for you, my fellow Disney Photographers and Flickr friends, I hope it meets with your approval.
