As of January 1, 2019, we have closed our forums. This is a decision we did not come to lightly, but it is necessary. The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk. The server software itself must be updated, and it cannot be without removing the forums.
So it is with a heavy heart that we say goodbye to our long-running forums. They came online in 2000 and brought together so many wonderful Disney fans. We had friendships form, careers launch, couples marry, children born ... all because of this amazing community.
Thank you to each of you who were a part of this community. You made it possible.
And a very special thank you to our Guides (moderators), past and present, who kept our forums a happy place to be. You are the glue that held everything together, and we are forever grateful to you. Thank you aliceinwdw, Caldercup, MrsM, WillCAD, Fortissimo, GingerJ, HiddenMickey, CRCrazy, Eeyoresmom, disneyknut, disneydani, Cam22, chezp, WDWfan, Luvsun, KMB733, rescuesk, OhToodles!, Colexis Mom, lfredsbo, HiddenMickey, DrDolphin, DopeyGirl, duck addict, Disneybine, PixieMichele, Sandra Bostwick, Eeyore Tattoo, DyanKJ130, Suzy Q'Disney, LilMarcieMouse, AllisonG, Belle*, Chrissi, Brant, DawnDenise, Crystalloubear, Disneymom9092, FanOfMickey, Goofy4Goofy, GoofyMom, Home4us123, iamgrumpy, ilovedisney247, Jennifer2003, Jenny Pooh, KrisLuvsDisney, Ladyt, Laughaholic88, LauraBelle Hime, Lilianna, LizardCop, Loobyoxlip, lukeandbrooksmom, marisag, michnash, MickeyMAC, OffKilter_Lynn, PamelaK, Poor_Eeyore, ripkensnana, RobDVC, SHEANA1226, Shell of the South, snoozin, Statelady01, Tara O'Hara, tigger22, Tink and Co., Tinkerbelz, WDWJAMBA, wdwlovers, Wendyismyname, whoSEZ, WildforWD, and WvuGrrrl. You made the magic.
We want to personally thank Sara Varney, who coordinated our community for many years (among so many other things she did for us), and Cheryl Pendry, our Message Board Manager who helped train our Guides, and Ginger Jabour, who helped us with the PassPorter-specific forums and Live! Guides. Thank you for your time, energy, and enthusiasm. You made it all happen.
There are other changes as well.
Why? Well, the world has changed. And change with it, we must. The lyrics to "We Go On" for IllumiNations say it best:
We go on to the joy and through the tears
We go on to discover new frontiers
Moving on with the current of the years.
We go on
Moving forward now as one
Moving on with a spirit born to run
Ever on with each rising sun.
To a new day, we go on.
It's time to move on and move forward.
PassPorter is a small business, and for many years it supported our family. But the world changed, print books took a backseat to the Internet, and for a long time now it has been unable to make ends meet. We've had to find new ways to support our family, which means new careers and less and less time available to devote to our first baby, PassPorter.
But eventually, we must move on and move forward. It is the right thing to do.
So we are retiring this newsletter, as we simply cannot keep up with it. Many thanks to Mouse Fan Travel who supported it all these years, to All Ears and MousePlanet who helped us with news, to our many article contributors, and -- most importantly -- to Sara Varney who edited our newsletter so wonderfully for years and years.
And we are no longer charging for the Live Guides. If you have a subscription, it's yours to keep for the lifetime of the Live Guides at no additional cost. The Live Guides will stay online, barring server issues and technical problems, for all of 2019.
That said, PassPorter is not going away. Most of the resources will remain online for as long as we can support them, and after that we will find ways to make whatever we can available. PassPorter means a great deal to us, and to many of you, and we will do our best to keep it alive in whatever way we can. Our server costs are high, and they'll need to come out of our pockets, so in the future you can expect some changes so we can bring those costs down.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for your amazing support over the years. Without you, there's no way us little guys could have made something like this happen and given the "big guys" a run for their money. PassPorter was consistently the #3 guidebook after the Unofficial and Official guides, which was really unheard of for such a small company to do. We ROCKED it thanks to you and your support and love!
If you miss us, you can still find some of us online. Sara started a new blog at DisneyParkPrincess.com -- I strongly urge you to visit and get on her mailing list. She IS the Disney park princess and knows Disney backward and forward. And I am blogging as well at JenniferMaker.com, which is a little craft blog I started a couple of years ago to make ends meet. You can see and hear me in my craft show at https://www.youtube.com/c/jennifermaker . Many PassPorter readers and fans are on Facebook, in groups they formed like the PassPorter Trip Reports and PassPorter Crafting Challenge (if you join, just let them know you read about it in the newsletter). And some of our most devoted community members started a forum of their own at Pixie Dust Lane and all are invited over.
So we encourage you to stay in touch with us and your fellow community members wherever works best for you!
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The last time we were in WDW, March 2007 a man in front of us was trying to use a tripod and a CM told him they were not allowed. I would contact Disney before you drag it with you and then find out it's not allowed.
When you guys focus on the the castle from a good distance away, the camera autofocus should set focus for infinity right?
Not always. I prefer not to preset to "infinity". Not all cameras use infinity for anything past 10 or 20 or 30 feet. In fact, I preset one camera to infinity and every one of my moon shots on a long telephoto lens were out of focus, I had to focus 1/4 turn short of infinity.
As a general rule of thumb, especially at MK, if you get to your preferred spot, autofocus on the castle, then set the camera to manual, that distance is set as a manual focus distance.
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Unless it finds something it likes better between you and the castle That's what my point and shoot would do but not sure about a DSLR. Then you use focus lock to manually lock that focus distance in?
Most all digital cameras work that way. The only difference is whether you have your autofocus set for region (IESP on some cameras) or spot. I prefer to set mine on spot, both on my DSLR and my Point and Shoots, that way I know what it's focusing on most every time...
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I'm just thinking aloud but in theory it would be the same as manually setting to infinity?
See above about infinity, or at least my personal experience with it...
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The catch for a point and shoot vs a DSLR might be that I find my autofocus to be less than reliable at night. Unless I'm close enough to the subject, it hunts at night and then sometimes doesn't always give me what I wanted. Whereas a DSLR is a lot faster and probably way more reliable focus in that spot? Setting to infinity myself takes the unreliability of my autofocus out of the equation.
Trust me, this is a problem no matter what kind of digital camera you have. If the camera doesn't see what it needs to focus, or it doesn't have a good grid projection focus (like Chezp's Sony with it's AVP vs Predator focus screen) distance night focus is a hit or miss on auto....
As most have already said, practice is the best way to learn what your particular camera will or won't do.
While you cannot practice specifically for fireworks without them, you can practice taking night photos which will give you a pretty good idea of how it will work, as well as what types of settings to use...
I do discourage people from using the fireworks setting on digital cameras unless you are using a tripod, or otherwise have the camera set solid. Most digital cameras set the shutter speed to 2 seconds in fireworks mode...
The last time we were in WDW, March 2007 a man in front of us was trying to use a tripod and a CM told him they were not allowed. I would contact Disney before you drag it with you and then find out it's not allowed.
The only place where the CM's have told someone they cannot have a tripod, that I know of, is at Fantasmic. Because you are sitting on benches/bleachers they cannot allow tripods for safety reasons.
If there are other places you cannot use them, I have not heard of them, and I'm sure someone will let us know...
The only place where the CM's have told someone they cannot have a tripod, that I know of, is at Fantasmic. Because you are sitting on benches/bleachers they cannot allow tripods for safety reasons.
If there are other places you cannot use them, I have not heard of them, and I'm sure someone will let us know...
We were at Magic Kingdom getting ready to watch Wishes and the man was setting up his tripod and that's when the CM came along and said he couldn't use it. It is for safety reasons. I don't know if thats true or not but that's what happened when we were there.
I've never had issues with taking my tripod around... neither did my uncle when he would go... (which was almost every year until he went through his battle with cancer )
Great tip to go to spot meter. Thanks. There's my mistake there. I'm gonna try that a little more. I use manual a lot at night and indoors in low light, but I love to use aperture priority whenever I can.
Wow, that's interesting about the tripod. I was recently there last month and took my tripod everywhere with me and used it a few times without incident. Then when we were on our DCL cruise, I took my tripod with me to every show at the Walt Disney Theatre.
I guess there's always that one CM who may be having a bad day or be low on "pixie dust" LOL!
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I don't think it's a bad day so much as some one that likes to follow the letter of the law... it makes sense in the group situations to not have a tripod... if something -heaven forbid- went wrong that tripod could cause serious harm...
I can see a CM asking you to move a tripod when you're, say, in the middle of Main St., since it could certainly cause problems in a surge of people. However, if you're someplace off the street and sidewalks (like in the Hub), I can't see there being an issue. I've never been stopped from using a tripod, but I have a faint recollection of being asked to move to another spot.
A way back there was a question about the difference between shutter priority and aperature priority that I'm not sure was covered...
When you choose shutter priority, the shutter speed stays where you put it, and the aperature changes to suit the lighting conditions. This is very useful for fireworks, where shutter speed determines the overall effect (how much streaking/trails/multiple shell build-up you'll get). Different aperature settings have little or no impact on fireworks shots, other than to obtain the right exposure - whatever works is fine.
As to manual focus issues, the last two pro-sumer digitals I've owned have "focus rings" for setting the manual focus (one is a Fujifilm, the other was a Minolta). As far as I know, with those cameras I can't let the autofocus lock in, then switch to manual in order to freeze the focus setting - when I switch to manual I spin the focus ring (it rotates continually) until I get the desired focus. The ring is not marked in feet/meters, and there's no Infinity setting - it's got to be done by eyeball. On an old-fashioned, fixed focal length SLR lens, Infinity really was "infinity." Life was so simple! Turn the focus ring until it stops, and there you are! The problem today is that focus is a slippery slope - it almost always varies as you zoom the lens (and nearly every lens in use these days seems to be a zoom). I'm sure there are also interactions with the autofocus system, since many autofocus lenses do not have a hard, mechanical linkage between the internal motors that focus the lens, and the external mauual focus ring - it wastes too much power to rotate the ring. I remember early Nikon auto-aperature/autofocus lenses, where there were rubber gear tracks on the outside of the lens and gears on the camera body that meshed with the rubber tracks to actually turned the aperature and focus rings. It doesn't work that way these days, does it?
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That's what my point and shoot would do but not sure about a DSLR. Then you use focus lock to manually lock that focus distance in?
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