I first visited the Mexico pavilion as a little girl. It’s one of my main first memories here. Not that it’s my only early memory of Disney—but something about that pavilion makes a special impression on a child. As a little girl I didn’t see the ceiling overhead. I wasn’t aware of the illusion. I just felt like I was in an open air town square. I remember so distinctly how they made the air move inside the building so that it felt like a soft breeze. Like an outdoor market on a warm summer night. And then when you boarded the boat and sailed by the restaurant there was this moment where you really might have been cruising past a set of diners in a land far far away.
This area is incredibly dark, so the shot was all about grabbing as much light as possible in a moving boat. Shot at 50mm to capture a normal field of view, shutter speed at 1/80 sec, f/1.2, and ISO cranked up to 3200.