The Walt Disney Family Museum

Today our family drove into the city (San Francisco) for a day trip to

The Walt Disney Family Museum

.

 The museum is located on the grounds of

The Presidio

which is a beautiful area in San Francisco.

 We started off in the hands on studio where Kev and Matthew worked on a stop motion video with Kelsey looking on.

 The subject of the movie short, very colorful!

 While they were creating, I took a walk around and found a couple of fun things to photograph. Wouldn't this look great on someone's bedroom wall?

 Kev's dream desk...animation desk at Disney!

 Matthew ended up working on his little short by himself

 One of the very few things I was able to photograph in the lobby area

 A replica of the apartment that sits above the fire station at Disneyland. While we were at the museum, we watched an hour long movie about Walt and his love for Christmas. This was included with the admission price. After the movie, we toured the museum. Like a lot of museums of this type, no photography was allowed.

We learned a lot about Walt's early life, saw a lot of pencil sketches that had been saved, and saw many old family photos. The museum had many different rooms filled with a lot of history and artwork. Toward the end of the museum, there was a large model of Disneyland with a few things that I remember from my first trip a long time ago.

 I was able to take this picture from inside the museum. It was a beautiful clear day!

 Once we were outside the museum, I took just a couple more photos...

Wish I could grow these at my house!

Again, I took these photos in RAW and did a quick edit in Lightroom. I was really hoping that a book that I had ordered would have arrived today to help me to establish a good workflow in Lightroom. Guess I will need to wait until next week.

This trip will be a great topic for my next letter to my Compassion kids! And I will be sure to get some of the photos printed to send to them. Which photos do you think I should send?

A little photography experiment

Today, I did something I haven't done yet with my photos...I shot RAW! This morning, I formatted a memory card (which basically erases

everything

on your memory card). This way I was able to start with a fresh, empty memory card since RAW files take up a lot of space.

Then I went into the shooting menu on my camera and changed the image quality to RAW. According to my 'Nikon D3100 for Dummies' book, shooting RAW will give you 'greater creative control', 'higher bit depth', and the 'best picture quality'. Shooting RAW requires you to edit them since you can't share them like you can JPEG images.

When you first import your RAW photos into Lightroom, they will look very flat. So after a little bit of editing, here are some photos I took today:

 1/10 sec, f/5.6, ISO 100, 55mm

 1/6 sec, f/3.2, ISO 100, 50mm

 0.4 sec, f/7.1, ISO 100, 200mm

0.8 sec, f/7.1, ISO 100, 200 mm

I wish I could show the before photos on each of these! Once I figure that out, I will try to post the before and after photos so you can see the difference also.

The January photo list has been e-mailed for the

Capture Your 365

challenge. I am looking forward to it! Will you join me?