This picture sat waiting in the wings for so long before today. I’ve considered it for you so many times, but it’s such a special scene—such an iconic little piece of old EPCOT—that I kept wanting to go back and do it again. Do it more deliberately. But for some reason I kept coming back to this version of it. It happened again yesterday and I spent a little extra time looking at this photo and checking out the framing and settings I’d used that day to see what was drawing me in.
It's a scene I love capturing. This water feature, the upside-down waterfall, opened with the original Imagination Pavilion back in 1983. It was meant to defy the normal bounds of your Imagination. A waterfall that goes the wrong way....
Between you and me, when I look back at the settings that I chose for my camera in this moment, I’m surprised. Lately I’ve been shooting moving water on an extended shutter more often than not—when you leave the camera's shutter open long enough to soften and blur the movement to capture motion. But here, I have everything dialed to the extreme to freeze time in full focus. I was using a gorgeous lens—the Sony FE 90mm f/2.8 Macro—and cranked my aperture all the way to f/22. Then ramped my shutter speed up to 1/800 seconds. Even still, it was bright enough that ISO landed at just 1600.
The settings are almost comically crisp. But the feeling is exactly right. This isn’t some smooth new water feature. This opened with the original Imagination Pavilion back in 1983. It's messy and frenetic. And you get just a wisp of the monorail track above. Enough to add a mental soundtrack to the image every time I look at it.