The best advice I can give you is having your camera ready at all times and just keep clicking. Here are a few suggestions in addition to “My Favorite Photo Spots at Disney World”:
Vacation Party
The ultimate objective of your trip to Disney is to spend quality time with your vacation party and create memories to last a lifetime. Well, I know I need help to remind myself of those memories. That is what pictures are for! You will always remember you went to Disney. All of you will not always remember the details. You won’t always remember the look on your vacation party’s faces or the feeling you had when you first went on a particular ride.
Pictures of your vacation party enjoying yourselves in your resort room will help your memory. The pictures of all of you eating a Mickey pretzel or dining in a restaurant will help you remember those fond memories for decades.
Candid Shots
Just because you want pictures of your vacation party, does not mean you need to have them clean their mouth/teeth before you snap the camera. Yes, it is cruel, but spontaneous photos catch the true sentiment of the moment. So, take the pictures as someone tears apart a turkey leg. Take pictures while they are not looking or expect it. Take a picture of their faces as they see characters for the first time. Talk about capturing a beautiful moment!
Get Closer to Your Subject
As I take pictures of people in a landscape picture or with a character, I snap multiple pictures starting with as much as possible in the picture as a whole. I then zoom in showing less landscape and then zoom in, again, getting mostly faces. This gives you a range of formal pictures to very personal pictures. For example, after you take that long range shot of the Castle with your family in front, zoom in to get more details of your vacation party.
Watch Your Lighting and Shadows
Those baseball hats are great to keep the sun off of your face, but they also put a shadow over your face in a picture. Just because you see the person’s face fine, doesn’t mean the camera will capture the same lighting. Do the best you can with candid shots, but when taking a structured picture, look around to see if there is a better angle or maybe use your flash to fill in any shadows on your subject’s face when indoors (or outdoors at night).
When you have a digital camera, it does not hurt to experiment on multiple settings to get the perfect picture. Pictures taken indoors can be very challenging. Take a few test shots before the important time comes for you to take pictures with characters, with food, with the group, etc.
Favorite Family Photo Area
Whether you are a Disney first-timer or it is your 10th time, it is not too late to choose your favorite area to have a family photo taken every time you go to Disney. It is a great way to compare photos and see how much the kids have changed along with how we are growing older….gracefully. My son started a special photo of the two of us several years ago.
Now, we both look forward to taking the special photo every time we see each other, which is not as often now than it was before due to him being a married, in the military and living overseas. These photo moments are so much more important now than ever before. I love reflecting back on all of them.
Too Many Photos? I Think NOT!
My husband once said to me on one of our trips to Walt Disney World “Enough pictures already”. In my normal, rebellion fashion, I continued taking as many pictures as I wanted, how I wanted and when I wanted. Fast forward many years and now my husband is thanking me for taking as many pictures as I did. (This would be an “I am right” moment.) He is having so much fun reviewing all of the pictures and said he has forgotten so much and this is helping him remember.
Now that we are empty-nesters, I do not comprehend the sentence “Too Many Pictures”. We do not print all of them. On the contrary, we keep them on in my computer, on USB’s and an external hard drive. I only print the pictures I want to frame or give to other people. We enjoy viewing all of our pictures on the computer. Prior to 2004, I was the one leaving Walt Disney World with 6-8 rolls of film. We have loads of albums to prove it! I have a very large SD card in my camera and bring an extra, just in case. I take videos with the same camera, too.
Scrapbooking/Photo Albums
While my husband and I prefer not to print all the pictures we take now, it does not mean everyone should do that. If you love scrapbooking, I know you will be printing them. If you love to take albums out for guests to view, then print them out! We have a smart TV so we just load the laptop, USB or hard drive to the TV and show the pictures on the TV. There are so many ways to show off your photos. Show them the way you want…..just be sure to show them!
If going to Walt Disney World, take a look at buying the Memory Maker. Click here for the details.