Scott Kelby’s World­wide Photowalk

After relent­ing for quite a while, I’ve decided to join Scott Kelby’s World­wide Pho­towalk again this year. I’ll be on the Epcot photo walk lead by Kevin Gra­ham. The walk was full, but it shows that there are three more spots open now. I guess peo­ple plan to be there and then life gets in the way. If you’re in the Orlando area this week­end and don’t mind pay­ing to get into Epcot, then here’s your chance to walk around with a bunch of geeks hold­ing cameras.

To be hon­est, I wasn’t plan­ning on join­ing Scott Kelby’s World­wide Pho­towalk this year. That’s not because I mind walk­ing around a Walt Dis­ney World park with a cam­era. I do that all the time. It’s mostly because of two other reasons.

• I don’t like crowds.
• I don’t like swel­ter­ing under the sun while in a crowd

I went on Kevin’s walk at Epcot last year and had nice time. In fact, I actu­ally won his pick for the best photo in the group. That shocked both of us because he specif­i­cally stated that he wanted to choose some­thing didn’t scream Epcot — which is exactly what I sub­mit­ted. Here’s my entry from last year.

You can’t scream Epcot much more than includ­ing a photo of Space­ship Earth. On the other hand, I sup­pose it had the virtue of being a dif­fer­ent kind of Space­ship Earth photo. Didn’t do a damn thing in the over­all com­pe­ti­tion, though. If I remem­ber cor­rectly (and I don’t promise that I do), last year’s win­ner was a won­der­ful shot of a kid jump­ing off a plat­form into water. You don’t see a lot of plat­form jumps at Epcot. In fact, I try to avoid shoot­ing other people’s kids — par­tic­u­larly at Walt Dis­ney World — because it makes peo­ple think you’re creepy. So I don’t expect to win any com­pe­ti­tions with my shots from Scott Kelby’s World­wide Pho­towalk this year.

Is it going to be crowded? You bet your ass. It’s Epcot on a Sat­ur­day dur­ing the Food & Bev­er­age Fes­ti­val. Is it going to be hot? Per­haps, but Kevin changed the time to run from 5:00 — 7:00pm this year. Truth be told, it’s hot­ter at 5:00pm than noon, but we may get some nice light toward the end of the walk.

The thing that finally changed my mind is that I met some very nice peo­ple at the pho­towalk last year, not the least of which is Kevin and his wife. When you get right down to it, the rea­son to go on a pho­towalk isn’t really about get­ting the best pic­tures. It’s to hang out with some nice peo­ple. Also, I want to get a bet­ter shot of that China Dome I posted above. Damn thing isn’t per­fectly cen­tered as I’d like, so this seems like a good time to go back and get another shot. Besides, shoot­ing the ceil­ing is one of the few ways to take a pic­ture at Dis­ney with­out hav­ing a tourist in the way.