Festival of The Lion King
Notes
As noted in the introduction, the photos in this collection were taken during six performances of the show over the course of a year. All four seating sections were visited at least once; the Giraffe and Lion sections were visited twice. One performance was photographed in January 2010, while most of the performances that appear here were from December 2010 or January 2011.
In taking these pictures, three lenses and two camera bodies were used. The first performance in early 2010 was photographed with a Canon Digital Rebel XT (EOS 350D) camera and an EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens. All subsequent performances were photographed with a Digital Rebel T2i (EOS 550D), mostly using an EF 70-200mm f/4.0 L USM lens, but an EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM was used occasionally as well. No filters were used, aside from the UV filters that are semipermanently mounted on each lens as protection from dirt/dust/impact/fingerprints.
The theater affords fairly good views from all seats, but unofortunately the vertical pitch isn't the greatest. Usually I tried to sit all the way in the back so I wouldn't have to worry about blocking folks behind me while trying to get pictures over the heads of the folks in front of me, but that wasn't always possible, nor is there much of an 'all the way back' in the Warthog and Giraffe sections. So, basically, if you see pictures where I should have been pointing the camera a little lower, I was probably trying not to get someone's head in the picture- or trying not to hit their head with the lens (especially the 70-200mm unit mentioned above). Plenty of pictures were actually taken between folks' heads to try to avoid the problem, but there are some instances of heads in the image anyway where it couldn't be avoided, but... So it goes.
All of these photos were taken in RAW format and converted to TIFF with Canon Digital Photo Professional. In Photoshop Elements (yes, I know...) I made (usually) gentle brightness, contrast, and color cast adjustments. Given that many of the the lights in the theater are colored with gels, I didn't want to remove color casts completely, but a gentle nudge here and there helped keep things looking a little more natural. All images received a gentle unsharp mask after resizing, then were saved as JPEG files for upload.
Photographs copyright © Matt N., 2010, 2011. Much of the stuff in them is copyright © The Walt Disney Company. All rights reserved by their respective owners.