No Flash Photography Please

This needs to stop.  We’ve all been there: you’re on your favorite dark ride, enjoying the scary tunes of the Haunted Mansion when suddenly *FLASH* everything lights up for a few brief moments.  You look around because you know this ride and there are no sudden bright flashes of light.  Then it happens again and you spot them: two doombugies down is a mom happily snapping pictures of her darling bundle of joy on its first Disneyland ride.  Snap, flash, snap, flash, snap, flash.  “No flash pictures!” You want to yell.  Or do yell in my case, because, NO FLASH PICTURES.

I get it.  You want to capture every second of precious little prince’s or princess’s Disneyland experience.  Maybe you are going sans kids and want to capture all the magical memories of being at the happiest place on Earth.  But you are literally RUINING DISNEYLAND.

I’m not sure you understand the concept of a “dark ride”, so let me quote Wikipedia: “A dark ride or ghost train is an indoor amusement ride on which passengers aboard guided vehicles travel through specially lit scenes that typically contain animation, sound, music, and special effects” (italics added).The key part of a dark ride is that it is specially lit to make it seem more real, to create the correct atmosphere, and to give the rider a reason to suspend disbelief.  I know Indian Jones is not really hanging from a rope above my motor-vehical as a giant boulder comes rolling down a hill.  But that doesn’t mean I can’t have fun pretending that it’s really him.  And when you click that little button or tap your little screen to get a *FLASH* you are ruining that moment for other people in the ride vehicle or in ride vehicles before and behind you.

Let’s say for a moment that you don’t care that you are literally ruining the experience for

Picture I took using flash in the Haunted Mansion queue-line (not on the actual ride yet).  I also immediately apologized to all around me for taking the picture.

at least 10 other people who also paid $295 for their 3-day park hopper ticket.  Let’s say that you are an entitled jerk who just has to have that picture on Pirates.  Your pictures will be crap when using a flash.  Case in point is the picture on the right.  I took that while in line of Haunted Mansion.  I was still in the queue, not on the actual ride yet, and I apologized to everyone around me once I finished.  If you know the Haunted Mansion, this staircase is at the very end of queue right before you board your doombugy.  Notice anything about that picture?  Cause I think it’s garbage.  It’s a crappy picture.  You can barely see the stair case, the cobwebs look dirty and there is some weird bug smear flying through it (I’m also sure this picture will later be used to “prove” there are real ghosts in the Haunted Mansion.  There are not.  That is a bug flying through the frame.)  Turns out that flash doesn’t work that well when the objects you are trying to take a picture of are farther away.  So not only are ruining other people’s experiences, you are getting crappy pictures too.

Haunted Mansion Holiday Nightmare picture taken without flash on my iPhone

I understand that you want to take pictures though.  And the good news is that you can!  JUST TURN OFF YOUR !@#$%^& FLASH!!!  I’m serious.  There are entire blogs about how to get great pictures on a dark ride without using your flash.  Here for example or here.  I’ve gotten some really fun pictures of dark rides with just my iPhone.  There are ways to use the lighting in the ride to your advantage and get that perfect picture that you can then upload to Facebook and make all your friends jealous.  Or, you can take a bunch of pictures outside the ride (I’ll even often to take one for you so you can be in it too) and just enjoy the ride experience.

But for the love of the mouse, stop ruining Disney with your flash photography.  It is against the rules for a reason.  You are destroying the magic for everyone else and the end result is a bad picture that doesn’t capture the moment anyway.