Trip Report The "We Wrote a Trip Report just because we went to Disney World" trip report.

This year our big WDW vacation was in the spooky month of October when the weather finally cools off to at least tolerable temperatures (or so we hoped).

Our tale involves a cast of two: me (Tweedledum) and Lyn (Tweedledee). This is our story...

Magic bands arrive (actually...forgot to take pictures of them, these are from our last trip)
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photoflight

photoflight

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
The "tweedlegetting" was for back a bit...gee, the pins are gone? Been too long since I've been here I guess

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...then the Tweedledee got a Tweedlepurse. Someone bought one while we were looking. Three were on the shelf. They claimed to have a few "in the back". The next day they were sold out. Tweedledee was happy :)

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Time to wander around a little more and enjoy the Halloween/fall colors
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Did I mention it was near Halloween? Yup. Real close. People are getting into dressing up these days.
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Hmm - wonder what this is roped off for...

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... maybe we'll find out. Coming up next - we broke the Fastpass system? Wicked!

Update: Apparently my tweedledum name is fitting as my recollection is off by a day. It has been politely explained that our purse-purchasing expedition was on our first day, not second day (otherwise Tweedledum - says Tweedledee - did we go back and find out they were sold out? Hmmm (says she)? She's right! :)
 
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photoflight

photoflight

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
slipperalwaysfits said:
Looks like a great day! I love the FP+ where if your ride breaks down or is closed for a spell, they give you FP options!
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It was very seamless too. I had that happen with the old paper fastpass system but not the new one, so I wasn't sure if we had to "do" anything. We stopped by the Fastpass+ kiosk (terminal/station/whatever) at Jungle Cruise and they scanned my magicband to make sure it was set up. Yup - no problem. Should've known - and should've known it was just as easy to try scanning our bands at the line!

Anyway, it worked out really well :)
 
photoflight

photoflight

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
slipperalwaysfits said:
Looks like a great day! I love the FP+ where if your ride breaks down or is closed for a spell, they give you FP options!
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Forgot to add that WDW also emailed me an update about the Fastpass change.

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Nice idea if you have a smartphone and if you bother to check email while you're in the parks. The only time I looked at my phone was to check the weather so I didn't get this update until later in the day. Again though, nice idea.
 
photoflight

photoflight

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Day two continues: we break the tweedlefastpass system and see a parade

Flashing back to this...
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...it's the Fastpass+ parade viewing area at MK. Most of the advice tends to be against getting a FP+ for this instead of an actual "attraction", but we really didn't mind losing other Fastpasses. Besides, the last time we saw the parade we had to stand around for over an hour to get even a marginally good spot. To be fair though, this day wasn't overly crowded and there were spots along the curb 30 minutes before the parade.

Ah, but wait! Before we embark on our parade viewing adventures let's flash back several weeks. A month before our trip we got an email about our parade Fastpass. The FP+ Gods decided - for whatever reason - to drop our reservations.

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photoflight

photoflight

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
What!? Instead of the parade we were now signed up to meet Mickey at 3pm. Ummmm... no. Not doing that, so we reshuffled our plans for the day and changed the Mickey meeting to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride (which was later closed too - not having much luck with these plans). We tried to figure out what was going on with the parade FP+ though. Was the parade canceled that day? No - doesn't seem to be. Did they stop doing FP+ for the parades? No - they're still doing it. Didn't see any chatter on the blogs about it, so we just ignored it.

A couple of weeks went by and I was still puzzled about this and decided to call the number they provided - in fact I called around 10pm (EDT). The WDW FP+ people answered on the second ring with no phone-system menu nonsense, just an easy to understand real person. Great! Sort of. After getting forwarded to a (I assume) supervisor, she quickly straightened out the problem.

Apparently there was a genuine glitch of some kind that canceled our parade reservations for no clear reason. They quickly added an additional FP+ and reserved it for the parade (on the itinerary it looks like we got a free any-time fastpass, but when exploring it in detail the pass was only for the parade). A nice side-effect was getting an additional Fastpass at the park. Can't complain about that.

I've heard that several others had the same problem with the parade FP+ reservations, but I'm certain we somehow broke it! Such drama. Tweedle!

With that behind us let's get back to our adventure in the park. After grabbing a snack we strolled over to the FP+ parade check-in at about 2:40 and found a swell place to sit looking right down Main Street. The FP+ viewing area was pretty empty. Not sure if that was another side-effect of the FP+ problem, the crowd level, or lack of interest in using a FP for the parade. I'm not complaining though because our view was fantastic! Had I known it was going to be that good I probably would have brought my Nikon.
 
photoflight

photoflight

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Original Poster
It was really getting cloudy so the quality of the parade pictures is all over the place as we went from dark cloud to bright sun and back. Still, considering I was using my mostly-untested tiny pocket camera I'm pretty happy with the results.

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The grand marshal arrives
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And the parade begins!
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photoflight

photoflight

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
At this point I'm thinking...yeah...FP+ for here is totally worth it. I think Tom Bricker mentioned it on his blog or a forum once. Only down side is I'd probably opt to bring two cameras if I were bringing my better camera equipment. There's so much happening and you're so close that two lenses are almost a necessity. The little RX100M3 did a halfway decent job but the focus didn't quite nail a few otherwise decent images. Most all of them also show motion which really is good and bad - mostly my fault for using "program mode" (I shoot manually with my other cameras and wasn't paying too close attention to what the Sony was doing by itself).

Back to the parade!

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Kind of windy that day too. Can you tell?
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photoflight

photoflight

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
I don't usually go out of my way for parades (but then again I don't go to MK very much either). The new Festival of Fantasy parade is ok though. The Halloween one is great and the Christmas party parades are good. All things considered I'd rather go to one of the party parades than the regular one.
 
photoflight

photoflight

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
fractal said:
Great colors from the RX1003, are those out of camera Jpegs or did you Post process?

enjoying the report and pics!
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Thanks - it's generally a decent camera.

I shoot everything RAW and work from there using Lightroom. I stopped exporting JPGs a long time ago too. Everything is processed ProPhoto RGB then gets dumped to my Smugmug site in sRGB without any other steps (presumably LR makes a .jpg on the fly, but I don't have the clutter of the files to deal with).

Also - almost everything is processed using the Sony "standard" profile, occasionally I used the "landscape" or "neutral" profiles, but the standard one worked well. I'm used to using the Adobe standard profile but the stock "Sony" profiles worked pretty well.
 
fractal

fractal

Well-Known Member
photoflight said:
Thanks - it's generally a decent camera.

I shoot everything RAW and work from there using Lightroom. I stopped exporting JPGs a long time ago too. Everything is processed ProPhoto RGB then gets dumped to my Smugmug site in sRGB without any other steps (presumably LR makes a .jpg on the fly, but I don't have the clutter of the files to deal with).

Also - almost everything is processed using the Sony "standard" profile, occasionally I used the "landscape" or "neutral" profiles, but the standard one worked well. I'm used to using the Adobe standard profile but the stock "Sony" profiles worked pretty well.
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Interesting as I use LR and SmugMug as well. After processing my RAW file I export a jpg file to my hard drive then download that to SmugMug. Is ProPhoto a plugin to LR?
 
photoflight

photoflight

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
fractal said:
Interesting as I use LR and SmugMug as well. After processing my RAW file I export a jpg file to my hard drive then download that to SmugMug. Is ProPhoto a plugin to LR?
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No, ProPhoto RGB is a color space. Apparently Lightroom uses that color space by default now - photoshop has to be configured for it to be a default. Any other external editing I do - if any - is also in ProPhoto RGB. Smugmug converts everything to sRGB as images or uploaded anyway. Actually, if I'd realized LR started in ProPhoto RGB as a default I wouldn't have made the comment! :)

You can use the Smugmug plugin for Lightroom to upload files without first making them .jpgs. That really simplifies cataloging and future editing. Any changes you make to the original raw image can be distributed to your galleries that have that image without much fuss. Same goes for any metadata changes...make a change or addition to the metadata attached to a raw image and the data will change in the galleries as well - you just have to go to the gallery in lightroom and click "publish" again.
 
MinnieM123

MinnieM123

Premium Member
photoflight said:
No, ProPhoto RGB is a color space. Apparently Lightroom uses that color space by default now - photoshop has to be configured for it to be a default. Any other external editing I do - if any - is also in ProPhoto RGB. Smugmug converts everything to sRGB as images or uploaded anyway. Actually, if I'd realized LR started in ProPhoto RGB as a default I wouldn't have made the comment! :)

You can use the Smugmug plugin for Lightroom to upload files without first making them .jpgs. That really simplifies cataloging and future editing. Any changes you make to the original raw image can be distributed to your galleries that have that image without much fuss. Same goes for any metadata changes...make a change or addition to the metadata attached to a raw image and the data will change in the galleries as well - you just have to go to the gallery in lightroom and click "publish" again.
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I haven't a clue what any of that means, but I do love your pictures!! :p
 
photoflight

photoflight

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
More parading!
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These guys were interesting
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Dragon! Actually a dragon that doesn't do much (well, any I guess) fire breathing when it gets up to where we are. That's ok.
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Goofy and his pals
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Mickey, finally!
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...and that's the parade!

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Here's a horse's head hitching-post. I have an idea about what they're for but... never mind! :)

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And that's the end of our second "day" at MK. Next up... we feed ourselves on some good old fashion Pop food and go tweedlepartying
 

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