Cinderella's Ice Castle

In the fall of 2008 our family visited Disney World for my son's senior high school trip. For a camera, we had my wife's convenient Canon 400D. The stock 18-55mm lens was on the camera which limited compositions as well as perspective control options. Long telephoto lenses can help minimize distortions when photographing from a distance. The ice decorations on the castle were quite stunning and so I worked on a couple of different compositions, mainly for practice, as I knew there would be some different techniques involved. On this particular image, I combined 4 frames vertically in Photoshop to give extra image area so that I could then perform a perspective correction. This composition poses several challenges including a huge dynamic range, hand-held image capture at ISO 1600 and 1/8 of a second, large crowds of people, and a tired tourist at the shutter. So this is the final presentation after RAW conversion in LR, vertical stitching and perspective control in PS3. I hope you enjoy the image and I encourage you to visit Disney World during the holiday season for some special treats like Cinderalla's Ice Castle.