There aren’t many scenes that I equate with Disney more than this one. It goes by in the blink of an eye—if you wait a beat too long to turn away from the buffalo, you’ll miss a good portion of the ride by. But when I see this, every sense fills in the blanks. I hear the rooster crowing and the dog barking. I smell Disney water and maybe a hint from something at Garden Grill up above that makes it seem like maybe something is cooking in the kitchen or grilling out back. I feel the rumble of the boat and what’s left of the dry heat from the prairie scene.
This shot is one of my holy grails. I’m always trying to do it better. For this, I settled at 35mm to take in the whole landscape. Reduced my shutter speed to 1/50 sec and opened my aperture to f/1.4 to get as much light as possible and cranked my ISO all the way up to 5000. Dealt with noise in the resulting image in edits. I usually don't mind the softened, painting-like feel that comes from this process and this was no exception. We obsess so much over sharpening every detail these days, but sometimes a little less captures the feel of a place better.