Exposed by Experts : Top Photographers Find Magic in the Kingdom

The day was still as dark as a witch’s caldron and Main Street was eerily empty when photographer Kathlene Persoff and her three assistants began unloading their equipment out of a van parked behind Snow White’s Castle in Disneyland.

It was shortly after 4 a.m. Tuesday.

By 5:45 Cinderella’s pumpkin coach had arrived and a stately white Lippizaner horse was standing by. So were the cast of characters Persoff would be photographing: Cinderella’s fairy godmother, four human-size white mice, the coach driver and, of course, Cinderella herself, resplendent in a pale blue ball gown.

Prince Charming, however, was nowhere to be found.

“Has anyone seen him?” asked Persoff, standing on a stepladder adjusting her large format four-by-five camera. “ Prince Charming, where are you? “

By 6:15 Persoff and crew had set up their lights, and Cinderella was calmly awaiting her leading man in the copper coach parked in front of the pastel-dappled castle.

By 7 o’clock several test Polaroid shots had been taken of the staged fairy tale vignette and, Prince Charming or no Prince Charming, Persoff was ready to begin shooting. She cued the fog machine, which laid a billowing white carpet around the wheels of the coach.

“OK everybody, hold still as much as you can,” Persoff said. “Here we go.”

Click.

“End mouse, move a little closer to the other mouse,” instructed Persoff. “OK everyone, hold still.”

Click.

“Good.”

And so, without the fabled prince, the shooting went on for the next 20 minutes. By the end of the day, Persoff would have photographed seven other setups, concluding, nearly 18 hours later, with a shot of Mickey Mouse in his fabled Fantasia role as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Persoff was not alone, however. Elsewhere in the park five other professional photographers were taking pictures of what is unquestionably one of the most photographed locations in the world.

But unlike the Instamatic-toting visitors who shoot an estimated 20 million pictures a year at the Magic Kingdom, the six professionals were on a special mission, one called, appropriately enough, “Focus on Disneyland.”

Personalized View

Their assignment: to capture a personalized view of Disneyland, using their specialized talents in the area of human interest; glamour, fantasy and fashion; action; industrial and technological design; landscape and architecture, and advertising and commercial.

In addition to Persoff, a light and design expert who specializes in still lifes and floral landscapes, the photographers hired by Disneyland included:

Craig Aurness, a top free-lance photographer whose work appears regularly in National Geographic; Charles William Bush, a leading glamour and fashion photographer; George Long, a noted sports and action photographer whose work has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Time, Newsweek and Life magazines; Jim McCrary, a leading still life and high-tech photographer, and John Zimmerman, a renowned sports and illustration photographer whose pictures have appeared in Sports Illustrated, Life and the Saturday Evening Post.

A fine-art approach to shooting Disneyland was the brainchild of Bill Kobrin, a Camarillo-based independent photographic consultant.

“The idea is, since Disneyland is the No. 1 theme park in the world that has been so completely photographed since its inception, I thought there are so many things in Disneyland that, given the eye of the artist, can be so beautifully done photographically,” Kobrin said.

“The idea interested us,” said Mark Feary, Disneyland’s division manager of marketing. “We hire a lot of photographers over the year mainly from a publicity angle. We wanted to display something that had more of an art flavor. We’re going to see Disneyland like we’ve never seen it before.”

The end result of “Focus on Disneyland” will be an exhibit of the best photographs culled from the hundreds of images shot Tuesday.

Marketing Tour

Although plans have not been completed, Feary said, the pictures will be displayed first in Anaheim, possibly at City Hall or at a public library. They then will accompany Disney characters on a Disneyland marketing tour across the Western United States early next year. A coffee table-size book is also being considered, he said.

All six photographers had made several advance trips to the Magic Kingdom to scout locations as well as take test pictures for scheduled shots. As the photographer assigned to “human interest,” however, Craig Aurness was an exception.

“I don’t have any fixed schedule,” Aurness explained while strolling down Main Street shooting street cleaners at 7:30. “The other photographers have a lot more planning involved than I do. I’m really lucky. I can go through 30 to 40 rolls of film today shooting variety constantly.”

Aurness, son of actor James Arness, already had shot various maintenance crews at work. “I’m really curious about what goes on during the non-normal hours,” he said.

His curiosity also led him beneath Fantasyland where he photographed the theme area’s sound system panel and where, to his delight, he discovered stacks of cassette tapes which, he said, were appropriately labeled, with descriptions such as: “screaming” and “squeaky door.”

Focus on People

Aurness said he would be focusing on people, particularly the interrelationship between Disney characters and park visitors.

He had arrived at the 300-acre park at 4 a.m. and planned to keep working until midnight--”or unless I fall over sooner. You cover a lot of miles here.”

Aurness said one of the most appealing aspects of the assignment “is that there’s a lot more variety per square foot than you imagine. I realized after four days of scouting that I still haven’t seen it all.

“This is the most photographed place on earth and to try to make an original shot is what you call a challenge. The challenge is trying to come up with a new way to see something that everyone has already seen.”

As a photographer who specializes in studio still life, product and horticulture photography, Persoff said the opportunity to shoot landscape, interior design and architecture at Disneyland was a challenge that “appealed to me.”

“I think it’s something an advertising photographer doesn’t get to do: It was whatever I wanted to do and my own interpretation,” she said. “For all of us, it was our own interpretation, using our skills and applying it to Disneyland.”

“I think as a photographer, every year I try to find something that is more challenging than the year before,” George Long said. “This was a tremendous challenge and also (an opportunity) to get to work with some of the finest photographers.”

Long was particularly pleased by the “excellent” cooperation of Disneyland officials, allowing the photographers to shoot whatever they wanted, except for the traditional taboo of snapping a behind-the-scenes glimpse of an unmasked Mickey or other Disney characters.

It wasn’t that way 15 years ago when Long came to Disneyland to shoot a Sports Illustrated assignment on America’s most exciting amusement park thrill rides and was not allowed to use remote cameras attached to the front of a Matterhorn bobsled.

This time, however, Long was being allowed to use remote cameras “to get the action and the excitement of the ride you won’t get any other way.”

His first shot of the day was on the Space Mountain thrill ride, and he planned to use remote cameras on the Matterhorn bobsleds, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and the Tomorrowland rockets.

With such unprecedented free reign to shoot what they want, Long observed that “if we don’t make good photographs, it’s our own fault.”

After a brief press conference at 9 a.m., the photographers once again went their separate ways.

Long and Aurness, however, headed straight for the Matterhorn, which by now was encircled by a long line of visitors.

While Long began rigging a remote camera to one of the Matterhorn bobsleds, Aurness started climbing up through the bowels of the man-made mountain which rises 13 stories above Disneyland.

Using a long telephoto lens, he planned to shoot people walking up and down Main Street and people riding the tea cups in Fantasyland.

Riding first in a freight elevator and then climbing up several flights of wooden stairs and, finally, a metal ladder, Aurness crawled up through a trap door onto a small platform on top of the mountain.

Surveying the spectacular 360-degree view, Aurness paused to take in the sights and sounds of the Magic Kingdom 147 feet below.

“Oh, it’s beautiful; just gorgeous,” he said, setting up his tripod.