Last Saturday morning I was in Las Vegas and had nothing to do until my flight home later that night. “Nothing to do in Las Vegas” I hear you ask? How is that possible? Well I’m not really into gambling and photographing Las Vegas in the day just isn’t as much fun as shooting at night. So I decided a field trip was in order. As Hoover Dam was only 30 minutes away (and I’d never been) I thought that would be a cool destination.
So Chris and I hired a car and we set off (just as a side note, it cost less to hire a car for 24 hours than the taxi fair too and from downtown Las Vegas, the night before). It took us around 45 minutes to get to Hoover Dam (not including our stop over at Lake Mead and this scary casino right by Lake Mead for some breakfast), and it was ridiculously hot – well over 100 degrees.
Now I would imagine that Hoover Dam is really fantastic at night, I’m told that it’s all lit up and looks amazing. If truth be told we tried to hire a car the night before but we got out of the conference after the Avis rental desk was closed. But during the day in September it’s pretty hard sunlight everywhere. Don’t get me wrong Hoover Dam is amazing especially when you realize when it was built (back in the early 1930s), but getting really cool pictures with the sun directly over head on the border of Nevada and Arizona, is pretty difficult.
Having said that I did capture a few images that I will post over the next few weeks but the first one I’m sharing is a picture of one of the two bronze angels.
On the Nevada side of the dam there are two winged figures that flank the American flag. Sculptor Oskar Hansen (who created these figures) has an overly complex description of what these statues are and what they represent, I really don’t understand any of that, but I thought the figures looked really great. There are actually two of these figures (or Angels) and I tried shooting them from quite a few angles. I tried to compose an image with the figures all in frame, but there were a load of wires crossing the top of the statues and while I could have removed those in post processing, the full size images didn’t really look that great.
The thing that caught my eye is the image below. I loved the contrast in the statue (the fact that I caught directly lit and shadowed parts of the figure) and the sky behind – which looked great I thought. So this is the image I chose to post. Home you like it.
Master Chief and Carter were arguing tonight over who had the bigger brain. Master Chief proved his was larger when he got it out to show Carter!
