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Making Sense of the Osborne Family Spectacle of Lights

Posted on November 28, 2012 // 2 Comments

It’s the right time of year to make another trip to Disney’s Hol­ly­wood Stu­dios to see the Osborne Fam­ily Spec­ta­cle of Lights.

Osborne Family Spectacle of Lights

Osborne Fam­ily of Lights

Imag­ine a city block filled with strings of Christ­mas lights. Actu­ally, you don’t have to imag­ine it. Just go to Google Image and search on the phrase “Osborne Fam­ily Spec­ta­cle of Lights” and you’ll see exactly how it looks. In fact, I’ll save you that step. The vast major­ity of the pho­tos you’ll see in that image search look very much like the one below.

Osborne Family Spectacle of Lights

Look closely at the crowd in the bot­tom of the photo and you’ll see a few folks grab­bing that snap­shot with their cam­era. The rea­son is under­stand­able. It’s sen­sory over­load. Lights are blink­ing on and off , other lights are spin­ning in cir­cles. There’s a thun­der­ous sound sys­tem berat­ing your ears with Hol­i­day music. Mean­while, some­one in that crowd is kick­ing your ankles or hit­ting your knees with a baby stroller.

You just gotta let the folks back home know about this place!

Cap­tur­ing all of those sen­sory expe­ri­ences — the motion, the sound, the pain in your ankles — is really a very dif­fi­cult thing to do. When some­one looks at a photo from your per­spec­tive stand­ing in the mid­dle the street, it just doesn’t reel them into the image. They don’t here the music or see the blink­ing lights. It’s a snap­shot of a spec­ta­cle that they missed. At best, this photo trig­gers some mem­o­ries for peo­ple who’ve already been there. Even then, they’ll say “You had to be there.”

Why fight that kind of uphill bat­tle with your pho­tos? Instead of com­pet­ing with over a mil­lion results of mostly the same image, why not try for some­thing a bit more unique?

Osborne Family Spectacle of Lights

While every­one is watch­ing the blink­ing lights on the main street, there are a bunch of lit­tle street scenes just wait­ing for you to com­pose and cap­ture with­out any inter­fer­ence. Each one has its own story to tell.

Some­times the pieces are more inter­est­ing than the entire puz­zle. [Click to Tweet]

How many times have you gone to take pho­tos at some place or event that was just over­whelm­ing your sense? Instead of try­ing to cap­ture the entire thing in one shot, pick lit­tle pieces that tell the story. You’ll end up with some­thing more inter­est­ing and powerful.

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About William

Author, Photographer and IT Manager. I have a fondness for chocolate. I also own Suburbia Press and Aperture vs Lightroom.

  • Scott Sanders

    William, we went to DHS to see the lights on Mon­day night just before clos­ing and it seems like each year Dis­ney imple­ments addi­tional crowd con­trol mea­sures. In my opin­ion, it makes it harder to move around. I’m with you, I try to avoid the crowd, but the side street seemed to be a big pho­topass area which resulted in more congestion.

    • http://www.orlandolocal.com William Beem

      I haven’t been yet this year, but I’m plan­ning on spend­ing an evening out there — per­haps mid­week to see if that has a smaller crowd. I’ve found that most of the Pho­topass pho­tog­ra­phers will let you get the shot you want, but you have to wait in line like any­one else. It’s not as con­ve­nient as just walk­ing up and tak­ing a shot, but I sup­pose it’s fair con­sid­er­ing every­one else is out of the way for that shot.