Disneyland Spring 2016 Construction Update

Our main reason for visiting Disneyland last week was seeing the gorgeous Tabebuia Trees in full bloom. I fell in love with these trees during the first Leap Day 24-Hour Party at Disneyland, and have loved photographing them ever since. They give a cheerful and lively vibrance to the area, and it’s impossible to take a bad photo of the hub when these trees are blooming.

This page of the update is mostly just photos I’ve taken recently at Disneyland, with several Tabebuia Tree photos. I wanted to share some new “real” photos because I was doing some “spring cleaning” of my photo folders over the weekend, and realized I have a lot of unedited Disneyland photos from the past year of living in California. I’ve taken a good number of photos, but haven’t edited many of them.

So, my new goal is to post one Disneyland photo every day on my Instagram account (@tom_bricker), and throw up a slew of photos here on the blog from time to time. Hopefully following through on this goal will motivate me to actually edit photos, rather than allowing them to collect dust in my archives.

Anyway, here are some random shots and commentary…

This is a photo I definitely want to redo with a better sky, but I like how Sleeping Beauty Castle’s wall frames the scene.

Shot handheld with my new Sony a7R II (as discussed in my Why I’m Going Mirrorless post), I liked this because the slow shutter speed gives the bird invasion in the background an almost abstract look. Not sure it totally works, but I like it.

If you click this teacups shot to view it larger, you’ll see the only person in focus is the little girl wearing the mouse ears. This is no Photoshop trickery, just dumb luck and timing.

With the trees blooming, it’s a perfect time for close-up photos of the statues in the hub. Dumbo gets enough attention, so I focused instead on Timothy Q. Mouse.

We’ve had some wonderful sunsets in Southern California of late, and this is a prime example. Come May and June, skies like this will be few and far between…

The blooming trees also make a great backdrop for portraits. I still have no clue what I’m doing when it comes to portrait photography, but a beautiful model can help save an inept photographer…

Space limitations make photographing the Disneyland Forever fireworks a challenge, so usually I just watch the excellent show. I decided to shoot the Frozen segment handheld with my fisheye lens to capture the energy and full atmosphere of the show.

Those Tabebuia Trees are really something else, aren’t they?!

Even the Star Wars and Marvel stuff can’t save the Innoventions building from being a waste of space, but at least it provides a nice vantage!

Okay, I think that about does it. I’ll be editing and posting new photos on Instagram all week, month, etc–however long it takes to eliminate my backlog, so make sure to follow along there to see additional photos!

I plan on doing more updates like this as long as there’s interest in them, so please provide feedback in terms of what you’d like to see. Construction walls? Refurbishments? Rumors? Merchandise? Random oddities? This is new territory for me, and photographing and writing about construction is fairly boring for me (hence the attempts at humor to entertain myself), so I’m not really sure what makes a “good” update that people will actually want to read. Please offer your feedback! 🙂

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YOUR THOUGHTS

What do you think about the construction at Disneyland and current state of refurbishments? Have plans to visit anyway, or will you be holding off until the construction is done? Any feedback on the format of these updates? Any other thoughts? Questions? Please share below in the comments!