Everyone Loves an Amusement Park

Everyone loves amusement parks. Thrill rides, kiddie rides, water slides, shows, characters, and junk food - amusement parks offer something for everyone. Whether you spend a day or a week at an amusement park, you should have plenty of photos to capture the excitement in your scrapbook pages. However, getting great photos can be tricky. Here are some suggestions to improve your amusement park photos and to scrap those that you do get.

Rides

Getting good photos of people on amusement rides can be very challenging. I have little children and they spend a lot of time on the kiddie rides that go round and round. I have found that the best photo is sometimes taken before the ride starts. After I buckle them in, I step back a little, ask them to beep the horn or pull on the reins, and I snap a photo. While the ride is going, I choose a spot on the perimeter where the light seems good. As they come around, I pre-focus on a group ahead of them, and shoot a photo each time they come around. Sometimes the boys start out smiling and get bored by the end, sometimes it's the opposite. By shooting photos during the entire ride, I have the best chance of getting the perfect photo. Once I get home, I like to group photos from similar rides onto the same scrapbook page.

Thrill rides such as roller coasters and water slides offer a different challenge. Many cameras are just not fast enough to get a photo of the ride in focus. In this case, you need to take a more creative approach. Try taking a picture of the riders getting in or out of the ride, of the drenched riders leaving the water slide, or a posed photo with the sign. Don't forget to take the blurry photo of the ride moving fast. It will work great in your scrapbook page to show how fast the ride was.

Characters

Many amusement parks now have their own characters. These often provide the best opportunity for posed photos. Inquire about special times when you will be able to get a photo with more than one character at a time. For the pictures in this layout, I handed my camera over to a park employee so that I could join my son in the photos.

Shows

Taking photos of the shows may also be challenging because the stage is often in the shade (or the house lights are dimmed) and you may be restricted to staying in your seat. When my son was picked as a contestant for Oscar's Big Game Show, I was so glad that I had brought my camera, but my photos weren't very good because I was stuck taking them all from my seat. To add interest to the layout, I blew up the center of one photo to show the look on his face. (The close-up photo is the same one as the top one on the left.) Of course, in this case the journaling is a very important part of the layout

Make a Montage

I find that a day at an amusement park often leads to lots of good pictures but none that are spectacular. In this case, rather than choose, try using them all by making a photo montage. The photos can be combined digitally and printed out as a single photo or combined by hand as I did in this layout from Sesame Place

Whether you spend a day or week, whether you visit once in a lifetime or every year, amusement parks are fun. Make sure you capture the smiles and have fun making the layouts.