Favorite Christmas Decor

I thought I would share some photos of my favorite decorations from the holidays in Disney. The last time I was there for Christmas decorating season was in January of 2011. Here are some pictures from that trip.

This is the tree at Downtown Disney. I love the board games surrounding the base of the tree.

Stars in Hollywood Studios

Christmas Carol in the windows of the Emporium in the Magic Kingdom

Magic Kingdom Wreathes

Front entrance to the Magic Kingdom

The Magic Kingdom tree

The Animal Kingdom tree

Nemo tree at Camp Minnie Mickey in Animal Kingdom

Disney's PhotoPass Review

    This is strictly my opinion about the Photo Pass options. I will not be going into every single detail about the packages and all that. If you want all of the logistics, here is the website.

http://www.disneyphotopass.com/

    Disney's Photopass is a photo system that you use throughout the parks. You are given a card from the Photopass photographer.

  The photographer scans this card after every picture that they take. This is only used with characters and the iconic photos in front of the castle.... You do not have to use the card, the photographers will still use your personal camera.

  There are also things called magic photos, which incorporates a character into the photos.

  This is my photo with Tinkerbell. The photographer poses you and you see the final outcome on the computer. 

   Once you get home, you register on the Photopass website to see your photos. They also add extra ones in there of the characters by themselves. A big issue with the website is that your photos only stay on the website for a limited amount of time. Once that time is up, your photos are gone. 

     Now, my big issue and the reason why I will never by my professional photos are the prices. For a photo cd of all of your pictures, it costs $169.95!!!  Not going to happen, when the photographers will use my own camera to take the pictures. 

     The picture above, I print screened on my computer. Doing this, means that my photos will come out a little blurry and smaller than if I bought the real picture. I am aware that it is essentially cheating, but I am not paying an insane amount of money to buy my photos. I meet all of the princesses and the photos taken with my camera came out the exact same ways as they did on PhotoPass. 

     The pictures are beautiful and the extra characters are awesome, but not worth so much money. I will stick to printing my own pictures at home. 

Below are comparisons between my photos and a PhotoPass photo.

Above: This is the photo taken with my camera

Above: This is the PhotoPass picture. Remember, I took this from print screen so it is blurrier than it would be. But still, the same picture.

Photo of the Day

Parades! This was taken during the Celebrate a Dream Come True parade back in January of 2011.

Photo of the Day

The Disney Electrical Parade is such an amazing show. I do like Spectromagic better, but this one is still really good.

The amount of lights is just spectacular and every person in the audience is in awe.

Disney never ceases to amaze me on the quality of their parades.

Photo of the Day

Since I've gotten back from vacation, I have gone straight back to work. So until I post a real blog entry, here is a photo from our vacation last week.

This was taken during the Kilimanjaro Safaris at Animal Kingdom. This was the closest that I had ever seen the giraffes. This photo was taken with no zoom!

Photo of the Day

This photo was taken at the Lego store in Downtown Disney. I was playing around on my photo program and this is what happened. The original photo was much brighter because I took it in the middle of the day, so this is quite a transformation. 

I think that it makes the dragon (from Sleeping Beauty) even more dark and sinister than it already is. 

I also like that you can not tell that this dragon is made out of Legos ;-)

Photo of the Day

My favorite pictures are usually of fireworks. I love the firework setting on my camera. I love how the fireworks look so much different in the pictures than they do when you actually look at them. 

Having the castle in the background just adds to the feeling of watching fireworks in Disney. The way that the fireworks surround the castle is just stunning. 

I always end up taking a million firework photos at Disney and they I have to go through and pick out the best ones. 

My advice with photographing fireworks is to just keeping shooting. Don't shoot so much that you don't take in the beauty of the scenes around you, but take enough. There will always be some bad pictures in the bunch but most of the time you will find stunning ones.