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The curse of theme park photography (known to just about every frequent
visitor), is that rides and shows for the most part take place in low light.
With all the animatronics, moving vehicles, and active performers involved it's
hard, if not impossible, to get good clear shots.
Flash photos don't work (they are usually under or over-powered), but this
doesn't stop people from trying anyway; which never ceases to amaze me in this
digital age. Doesn't anyone look at the LCD and realize flash photos look
horrible?
So folks are reduced to shooting photos with the flash turned off, sometimes
meaning the camera doesn't have time to focus properly and thus never takes a
picture. Or, just as often, any picture that is taken comes out dark and blurry.
The above photo was taken by my Rebel XT, a low-end Digital SLR that I've had
for some time, using the "kit" lens that came with the body. The colors may look
good, but most things are blurry in the frame.
Contrast that with what's possible when you remove the kit lens and snap on
something created specifically to handle low light:
This is the result of a Canon EF-50mm f/1.4 lens on the same Rebel XT body.
The 1.4 number in the lens is the f-stop, meaning how big the aperture is and
how much light is allowed in. The smaller the f-stop, the wider the aperture is.
When the lens opens up that big, more light can get in even with faster shutter
speeds, and suddenly it becomes possible to photograph active robots from a
moving vehicle.
When I first turned on the new lens, I left it in fully programmable mode,
the most automatic settings. When set like this, the camera is just a fancy
point-and-shoot with a lens that can see better in the dark. The result was an
improvement over usual lenses. You could see much more of the details usually in
the dark. But some things are still blurry like this.
The 50mm on the lens refers to how zoomed in or wide angle it is. This kind
of lens doesn't shift; you can't zoom in or zoom out. It's always at 50mm. With
the Rebel XT, which has a sensor that isn't quite "full size," that means that
it's zoomed in as if it were an 80mm on a regular camera. Everything ends up
being a little close.
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