Engagement at Epcot

"Engagement at Epcot" -- sounds a bit like the title of a Star Trek book, doesn't it? But it's not. It is just the title I came up with for a couple of photos I took at Disney World and promised the people in it a copy. Here they are --



Each of the above photos is a link to a page in my Flickr.com photo-sharing account. These are the best two of a set of six. Click here for the whole set.

Background: The Teleospouse and I were walking around the lake at Epcot after the fireworks and had stopped to admire the view from the Venitian-style bridge in the Italian section. We were approached by a young lady who told us that she had just been proposed to and needed to have a photo taken of her and her new fiancé. As you might have guessed from the photo, they are not native Floridans; they are from Tennessee.

She handed me her camera and I snapped a photo or two of her and her young man, and while I was doing that my wife told her that I had a better camera than hers and that I would be glad to take a photo or two and send her copies. This is all true, as far as it goes, but it gives the false impression that my several-year-old, high-end point-and-shoot Kodak can reliably take wonderful flash pictures of subjects standing in really-dark places. *sigh* But, the young lady was very excited about the idea and I can usually take salvagable photos and I am pretty good with photo editing software so I can usually get something presentable out of the effort.

Without a tripod, and not wanting to take half and hour to set up the shot, relying on ambient light was not feasible so I needed to use the flash. I stood a bit too far away from the subject for the flash hoping that when I adjusted the exposure later some of the background would come too. I took several shots because my camera has trouble autofocusing in the dark and, after we said goodbye to the couple I took a few better-exposed photos of the backgrounds (the same shot, more or less, withoug the couple in the foreground and without the flash) so I could put them in later if I needed to (which I did).

The two photos above are composites made by adding a shot of the couple to a shot of the backgrounds taken a few minutes later. The photo on the left has the same building behind them as in the original photo while the photo on the right shows the Epcot lake (on the opposite side of the bridge.)

The wife and I really enjoyed running into this newly-engaged couple. It had been a rather long day by that point and we were starting to fade. Mooching off of their excitement brought back the zing in our evening.

They seemed like a very nice couple and The Teleoscope wishes them well.