Freemont Street – Las Vegas

20. September 2012 · Comments Off on Freemont Street – Las Vegas · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

I really wanted to post a Freemont Street picture from my trip to Las Vegas, but none of them turned out that great.  For example in this example I didn’t get the Freemont neon sign in the image at the top of the frame!  What was I thinking.

If you’ve ever been to Freemont in Vegas you probably understand the problem.  There are a lot of distractions here and I may not have been focused (mentally) on doing a great job.  But as it was such a funny evening I thought I’d post the image and tell you about it.

I think this was the Friday night after the conference and we wanted to go to Freemont to capture some cool neon lights.  So we jumped in a cab and off we set.  Now this is really down-town Las Vegas and not that far from the strip.  But on this Friday night the traffic was unbelievably bad.  We were sat in one lane on the freeway (I’ve no idea why we took the freeway) while everyone else went past.  When you are in a strange city you really have to trust your taxi driver, but this guy was taking liberties.  Eventually we got off the freeway and he then changed into the lane that had been driving past us for the last 5 minutes.  When we arrived at Freemont Street and the charge was $45!

Apparently the reason for the bad traffic was there was a Gay Rights Pride march through town and the place was packed with people.  You have NEVER seen anything like it, it was actually pretty funny.  Like the strip there were numerous people in costume waiting for you to ask them to pose for a picture, only this time the costumes were a little more “mature” in nature.  I won’t elaborate here but if you see me ask.  Needless to say I have lots of interesting pictures that I’ll never post here.

After an hour there all the lights went off and we were treated to a video rock concert on the ceiling.  Pretty fun but I kept checking my wallet as it was a pick pockets dream.  While we watched the show above we did encounter one baby in a stroller staring up and his face was a picture.  Pity I didn’t capture it.

Anyway I captured the shot below that does show the neon lights overhead pretty well.  The people in the image at the bottom of the picture were pretty clear and some weren’t “family friendly” so I blurred them deliberately.  This is however one time where I wish I was back there with my side angle lens.  I’d love to try and capture this street again.  Maybe next year.

The guys decided to have a walkie talkie conversation tonight, but they probably should have stood further apart.

High Scaler – Hoover Dam

19. September 2012 · Comments Off on High Scaler – Hoover Dam · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: ,

Tonight’s picture captures another sculpture from Hoover Dam.  This piece of art work is pretty new though, the piece was commissioned in 1998 and depicts one of the most dangerous jobs required to build the dam.  The job is called a High Scaler and involves sitting in a little “bosun’s chair” and being suspended hundreds of feet in the air and setting charges into the face of the canyon’s walls to remove lose rock!  The status is based on Joe Kine who carried out this job for a few large dams in the 1930s and 1940s.  The monument is dedicated to the 98 men who lost their life during the dams construction and actually sits on the visitors car park.

So as you drive up you see this statue and it grabs your eye immediately, it’s really impressive.  We parked up and I immediately ran to the sculpture to get a picture.  Unfortunately the statue was back lit and my first few shots captured a great silhouette.  It took me a few attempts to get the angle right so I could light the front of the statue.  Ideally I would have had a flash with me to light it up even more, but it was ridiculously hot and we couldn’t be bothered to go back to the car to get them. (That’s terrible to admit but the truth).   So I made do and eventually go the shot below.

The statue is not that high off the floor (around 6 feet).  But I didn’t want the floor in the shot so I had to get quite close.  But I love the blue sky in the background the and red rock he’s climbing.  When I got home I was very pleased with the image and think it came out well.

Sometimes at night you just need a nice bowl of cereal.  The guys saw a commercial on TV and ran to get out some Life!

Mandalay Bay Restaurant – Las Vegas

18. September 2012 · Comments Off on Mandalay Bay Restaurant – Las Vegas · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: ,

I’m not sure why we like the images we do, I guess it’s all down to personal taste.  Sometimes there’s an image with an interesting subject that attracts you, other times it’s a place you’ve been to or want to visit, maybe even someone you love or care for.  Hopefully you like an image because it creates an emotion of some kind in the viewer.  But every now and then you find a picture that you like but you don’t really know why.

Tonight’s image kind-a falls into that category.  Truth be told I know why I like the image, but it’s not obvious.  I think the literal definition of photography comes from Greece and means “drawing with light”, and it’s not until you really start to dabble in photography that you start to learn how important light is.  The reality is it doesn’t matter how amazing or beautiful a subject is, it it’s badly lit it won’t be a great photograph.  Learning to manipulate late and use it well is a never ending challenge.  This is something I’m still working on

One of the reasons I like HDR photography is that you get to draw with light after the fact.  Sometimes when you take a picture you can’t control the light, you can’t manipulate it how you want and you get what you get.  With HDR you take multiple images with different exposures and when you get home you create a new image by merging the images together, taking the light from each picture to produce the desired result.

Today’s image was taken at the Mandalay Bay. We walked past this restaurant every day and there was never anyone in it.  I loved the lighting and thought it would make a great HDR.  This was made up from 3 separate images and then merged together in Photomatix and Photoshop.  While the direct lights are a little bright they don’t detract from the image.  In the end I think the image came out pretty well.

The Halo guys decided to play on their climbing frame today, lots of exercise, loads of fun.

Hoover Dam – Nevada

17. September 2012 · Comments Off on Hoover Dam – Nevada · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

I looked through my picture library tonight and decided to post this image from Hoover Dam.  This is a really rare picture of the dam with nobody in shot.  Talk about having patience I waited ages for this image.

Obviously there are two sides to the dam, there’s the water side (this side) and the “dry” side.  It was ridiculously hot there and getting a good picture in direct sunlight was proving to be difficult.  But this one really came out well.  I stupidly didn’t have a wide angle lens with me so getting “everything” in to really show the dam was very difficult.  So I had to chose compositions that showed enough to make an interesting picture but still showed the majesty of the dam.

This really is an amazing piece of engineering, especially when you consider when it was built (1931-1936).  In this image I’m standing in Nevada, looking across the dam towards Arizona.  I have no idea what the purpose of the large towers are but they look really cool coming out of the aqua marine water.  When I looked at this image when I got home it’s almost like a landscape from “starwars” or something, it just strikes me as something from another planet.  For this reason I LOVED the image.

What made this fun to take was I was using a new tripod but to get the picture I wanted I needed to put the tripod onto the bridge wall.  However I needed to get the camera as low to the bridge as I could.  So I turned the legs upside down and turned the tripod over, so the camera was hanging upside down under the top of the tripod.  People were walking past me looking at me like I was nuts.  but this was the end result so well worth the stares.

This is art imitating life!  Tonight I got home with a horrible headache, I think Carter was feeling it too hence the picture.

Alfa Romeo 8C Superleggera – Redmond

16. September 2012 · Comments Off on Alfa Romeo 8C Superleggera – Redmond · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: ,

I thought I’d take a break from Las Vegas today, you really can have too much of a good thing.  So I decided to post a car instead.  Yesterday I visited the Exotic’s Car Show in Redmond and saw some pretty cool cars.  One of my favorites was this Alfa Romeo 8C Superleggera.  Now I’ll be honest I have never seen one of these before.  At first I thought it was some sort or “bat mobile” rip off, but once I got close it was very obvious that this was a real car.

The owner of the car was demoing some of the cars features.  As the car came out in the 1930’s it didn’t have any turn singles on it.  Instead it had these little arms that popped out on either side when the driver pulled a lever.  The car has amazing lines (the front engine compartment and wings being I thin the most impressive) and a beast of an engine.  It has a V8 3.8 liter engine and when the owner fired it up it really did sound like the bat mobile.

Obviously being something very different the car had people round it all the time.  I was pretty patient and waited and waited but I really wasn’t going to get a shot without spectators.  So I decided to cut my losses and do some magic in Photoshop.  So you can’t see them now but there were people all around the back of the car, and all along the other side.  It took me a couple of hours to remove them but you really didn’t want to see loads of people standing around the car.

To hide some of the “Photoshop” work I applied a heavy vignette too, that also had the benefit of drawing you in to the car.  I think the end result is pretty good and the car was amazing.  I really wouldn’t be surprised if this was the inspiration for Tim Burton’s bat mobile car, to me it looks pretty similar.

Carter was on candle duty tonight, this time to put them out.  Master Chief just watched.

« Older articles
Newer articles »