With weather today in the comfortable high 60s, we went to Epcot for a few hours, including riding Spaceship Earth and Nemo – and at the aquarium there we saw this “hidden Mickey” at the bottom of the water:

Nice flowers everywhere, too!

We planned to go late to Magic Kingdom, to catch the midnight fireworks – previously we’ve gone earlier in the day and not made it to midnight! But driving through Walt Disney World we saw signs saying the Magic Kingdom was closed! Turns out it was VERY VERY full of people, but by the time we got there about 9:30, some folks (like us previously) had left, and so we got in.

Everywhere through Main St and around Cinderella Castle, people were stopped and already waiting for the show more than two hours away! Temporary one-way routes through the park eventually got us to Frontierland, and we did get on rides easily enough – must be the shortest queues on the busiest night of the year!

We finally arrived behind Cinderella Castle near Disney Philharmagic, expecting to see partial views of the fireworks; however we discovered the special New Years show is a “360 degree” event with fireworks in front, behind and to the side! It was all quite fabulous, and my phone camera does a poor job of sharing it with you …

Perhaps a video better captures the event, and shows just how surrounded by fireworks we really were!

Before heading back north, we had visited the Epcot flower festival – here are some pictures …

More pictures in the Gallery

We have to go to Sanaa when we are down here, and that means admiring Giraffe, Zebra, and other animals in the “semi wild” of Animal Kingdom Lodge …

Lots more pictures in the Gallery

A short montage of water videos from yesterdays trip to Epcot – you’ll see the “upside down” waterfall, “jumping” fountains, and a boat trip on World Showcase Lagoon …

Another trip to Epcot while the weather is dry! Good cloud views …

We also, for the first time, crossed World Showcase Lagoon on the launch:

We enjoyed a fabulous lunch at Sanaa today, with a beautiful “savannah” background and herds of Giraffe passing by!

Another feature of my new Sony A55V camera is “HDR”, High Dynamic Range. The concept of this technique is to photograph the same scene at a number of different exposure levels, then blend them to get a picture with more range/detail than any one photo – bringing detail in to the shadow areas, without washing out all the bright areas.

Here is a single photo taken without HDR and with no editing; you can see that there’s not much detail in the sky, or in the shadows of the building:

Here is what the Sony took, with it’s HDR function active – it doesn’t look like the Sony does a very good job, and you can see “ghosts” of the moving people …

So finally, here is the first photo manually edited in Aperture; I brought up the shadows, then brushed in some darkening only of the sky – I prefer this version!

We went back to Epcot last night, to wash the fabulous Illuminations fireworks; it was very windy and everyone got pelted with shrapnel more than once – we collected a few souvenirs (quite big pieces too, the largest about 5″x5″!):

A perfect opportunity to try out the “auto panorama” feature of my new Sony A55V camera – and it worked pretty well I think! It’s a little tricky to judge what speed to rotate the camera to get the desired panorama width, but this second try worked just about perfectly …

(click for much bigger)