Old Photo: Walt Disney World Monorail in Color

A colorful Walt Disney World Monorail glides through a sepia-tinted world in this photo from 2009.

For this latest addition to the Old Photo series, I thought I would try something a little different, just for a change. Actually, this turned out even more different than what I had originally planned. My thought was to have this just be an old-looking old photo, making it look much older than it of course actually is, due to the sepia look. But then I got the bright idea to have the Monorail itself be in color to have it stand out against the background more.

One reason I thought of this was that a friend had asked about using a similar effect in the near future, so I thought I would give it a try here. I have done some similar things before, but it has been a while, so I thought it would be good to brush up a bit.

As it turns out, this might not have been the best photo to practice on, because there are a lot of little leaves and branches in front of the Monorail in places, and it took some time to get all of that right. But I think it turned out well in the long run.

So this Old Photo is sort of a combination of looks of a really old photo and a new photo, when the actual photo itself was taken somewhere in between.

Oh, and if you are wondering, this photo was taken on the walkway that runs between the Contemporary Resort and the Magic Kingdom. You can see the upper reaches of Space Mountain rising behind the Monorail. For whatever reason, I have a natural reaction to stop and take a Monorail photo whenever I see one anywhere around. The Monorails are like magnets to my camera, I guess.

Even when I am old and gray, do not forsake me, my God, till I declare your power to the next generation, your mighty acts to all who are to come. - Psalm 71:18

About the photo:

This photo was created using two different layers of the same photo. The lower level was the sepia layer, created using the Nik Camera Filters in Photoshop; the top layer was the color layer. I then created a mask to hide everything on the top layer except for the Monorail. Most of that was selected using the lasso tool in Photoshop, although I did have to go through and brush out a lot of the small leaves.

Also, you probably noticed that I used a different crop ratio on this one, going with a 16:9 crop. There were two reasons for that. First, it helped to bring the focus more on the Monorail, since it is long and straight. And also in the original photo, there were some people walking in the foreground, but now they are gone. I usually leave photos at their original ratios, although I don’t have a problem with cropping them for effect.

Here is a before-and-after look, except that the whole thing is at the new crop instead of the original ratio. As you can see, while the Monorail was always intended to be the main focus of the photo, it didn’t stand out from the rest of the photo, particularly with the palm tree in front of it, in the original color version.

Photo: A single Raw exposure, processed in Photoshop. Read more about photography tips, photo software, camera gear, and more at Steve’s Photography Tips.
Camera: Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT
Date: July 20, 2009
Location: Walt Disney World, Florida