Yesterday, the boys asked to go to Mitsukoshi—the shop at the Japan pavilion. It’s their favorite little ritual as Disney locals, going there and picking out a soup, a treat, and a drink to take home and make and eat for dinner. We used to get an incense too but I have a drawer full now so we’re trying to use up some of our stock before we get more. My daydream moving here was lunch at EPCOT, theirs is apparently dinner from EPCOT.
It seemed like the perfect opportunity to take my camera along and grab some shots of the park all done up for the Flower & Garden festival, which starts this Wednesday, March 5th. They patiently agreed to walk a full World Showcase loop as a part of the trip.
At first I was grabbing photos of lots of details as we walked but then I realized that in my eyes there was no other way to kick off these pictures of my favorite Festival than this view, which is, to me, the most iconic sightline of Flower & Garden. EPCOT is never more beautiful than it is during this Festival in the spring, and nothing embodies that more than the view of this hill beyond the water covered in flowers with a monorail overhead and the Land and Imagination pavilions in the background. So our walk around World Showcase dipped into Future World (or whatever I’m supposed to be calling that area as a whole these days).
I framed up the shot to get the track and its reflection lined up as leading lines in the image and asked them if they’d mind waiting for the monorail. They said no. The monorail finally came by and….I missed the shot. It just didn’t come together. So I asked them if they’d mind waiting one more time. Bless them, they said alright. At this point they were just sitting on the ledge of the planters and in no hurry from what I could tell. We waited again and I got this.
I was shooting with my 35mm. We were losing light as the sun dipped lower so I needed to gather what I could of it. In the end my settings (which I had plenty of time to test as we waited for not one but two monorails to pass overhead) ended up being 1/80 sec, f/4.0, ISO 100. I probably could have ramped up my ISO and cut back elsewhere but no harm done as I love what I got out of these settings.