Disney After Dark – Capturing Dazzling Images with the Panasonic ZS40!

Disney World, with its iconic characters and landmarks, is a mecca for photographers, amateur and professional alike.  Millions of photos are snapped in the Disney parks and resorts each year, most by parents hoping to capture that perfect, adorable picture of their kids hugging the famous Mouse or standing in front of Cinderella’s magical castle for the very first time.  Snagging those quintessential Disney vacation photos is lots of fun and sharing them with friends and family back home via our social media channels can be even more so.  These days we tend to take most of our photos these days with our smartphones so that we can share them instantly.  Unfortunately, the quality of the images our phones take tends to leave a bit to be desired.  Enter the new Panasonic Lumix ZS40.

Social Media Sharing is a SNAP!

One of the coolest features of the Lumix ZS40, which Panasonic bills as a digital all-in-one adventure camera, is the fact that the camera is it’s own wireless hotspot.  Each camera is equipped with its own SSID and password that enables you to link the camera to your smartphone making sharing images from your camera to your social media network super simple.  All you need to do is download Panasonic’s Image App to your phone, turn on the camera’s wi-fi, find your camera’s SSID your phone’s wi-fi settings, connect and launch the app.  From there you can drag images from the camera to be saved onto your phone’s camera roll and even operate the camera remotely.  And the quality of the images you’ll share will blow your friend’s minds!

Lessons with a Lumix Guru

As a member of the Traveling Mom writer’s network, I recently spent the weekend in Disney World at the annual Traveling Mom Retreat.  During the retreat I had the opportunity to learn all about this fantastic new camera with Lumix Luminary photographer Rick Gerrity.  According to his bio, Rick has a passion for “transforming seemingly ordinary, everyday moments into extraordinary images.”  Take one look at Rick’s work and you’ll see for yourself how he does exactly that.  Rick is a patient and supportive teacher with an enthusiastic and generous spirit and the evening we spent with him in the Magic Kingdom was both fun and memorable.

Prior to the retreat I had said that I wanted to learn how to shoot fireworks.  You see all these incredible images of the Disney fireworks online and mine are always terrible.  At the same time, I also said that I really struggle with night shots.  As much as I love the Disney parks in the Florida sunshine, I think that Disney World is just gorgeous at night.  Everything sparkles!  I’ve never been able to capture the way the nighttime lights twinkle in Disney with my camera and that was my mission on this trip.

Filters with MAGICAL Effects

The Lumix ZS40 has a number of very cool filters that allow you to tweak your images both before and after you take them.  Rick had us trying out some of the different effects the camera offers as soon as we stepped through the gates of the Magic Kingdom.  I shot this picture of the Town Square Theater just past the park’s entrance.  After I took the photo I tweaked it using the camera’s Creative Retouch mode, applying the Old Days filter.

My two favorite filters (so far!) are the One-Point Color Effect and the Star Effect.  The One-Point Color effect allows you to choose a particular color and set that color in the camera.  Then, when you are ready to take a photo, the camera filters out all of the colors from the scene you shoot except the color you set.  I’m going to share an example of the One-Point Color filter at the end of this post.  The Star Effect filter is the one that really helped me rock my Disney Side when night feel that evening.  With this filter, any point of light you capture in the scene you’re shooting explodes with little beams of light going each light in the shot a bit of extra dazzle.  And paired with the camera’s powerful 30x Leica soon lens, the Star Effect filter was absolutely perfect for Disney After Dark!

Here are a few of my favorites:

By the end of the evening, I felt like I had a pretty solid grasp of my new Lumix fresh out of the box.  The learning curve on this dynamic little camera was far less steep than I’d feared, though there are still many, many features I need to understand in order to use it to it’s full capacity–video, Intelligent Auto, Aperture Priority, Scene Selection and much more.  Most of us learn best by doing, so that’s what I’ll be doing.  Hopefully I’ll be back in Disney World soon, too!

At the end of the night I headed back to the Boardwalk Resort where we were staying during the retreat and took this photo using the remote feature on the camera and snapping the image with my iPhone.

And then I headed to the resort’s Belle Vue Room Lounge for one of their famous Belle Vue Cosmos, and sank back into a comfy chair to look through the pictures I’d taken that night–after I snapped one last shot.

To learn more about all of the great features of this digital dandy, spend some time over at the Lumix Lounge and be sure to follow #LumixLounge and @RickGerrity on Twitter.  And the next time you capture some fabulous shots of the Disney Parks After Dark, be sure to share them yourself using the #DisneyAfterDark hashtag.

Disclosure:  I received a Lumix ZS40 from Panasonic as part of my participation in the Traveling Mom writers’ retreat, where we were guests of Disney.  All of the opinions expressed in this post are, as always, entirely my own.