Vegas Baby!

Although I am not of big fan of large cities or big crowds, one of my favorite places to go for a few days is Las Vegas. Yes, I do enjoy the gambling, but there is actually a lot of other great things to do there. My wife and I have been going to Vegas for many years. It was actually very reasonable to fly to Vegas and stay in a luxury hotel . Over the past few years it had gotten much more expensive to not only stay, but show prices and meals are no longer reasonable for my budget. But I still have been going at least once a year in September to attend the National Association of Photoshop Professional's conference held yearly at the Mandalay Bay Casino and Convention Center. (A tough job, but somebody's gotta do it)

As a photographer, you will love Las Vegas for the endless possibilities it provides for you. Since I love the long exposure night scenes and colorful images, welcome to heaven. After you have lost your hard earned money in the casino, grab your camera and tripod and head out for some night shots. It is not difficult to find a suitable composition as the entire length of Las Vegas Blvd. is a circus show on steroids.

You can photograph everything from the entire New York skyline to the Eifel Tower. The worst problem is dealing with crowds if you have a tripod set up and you are trying to shoot long exposures. The streets and sidewalks are still jam packed at 3:00am. A daylight walking trip also provides many great scenes and interesting thing to photograph. Having been to Las Vegas so many times now, I spend far more time trying to make some good images than I do inside a casino.

Here is one of my favorite photos that I have from my trips to Las Vegas. The New York New York Casino is located at the intersection of Las Vegas Blvd. and Tropicana Ave. I took this shot just after the sun went down below the horizion. I love how it brought out the blue twilight color of the sky.

So what do you do on the plane ride home from Vegas after a Photoshop World Convention? Why you take a photo out of your plane window, download it onto your laptop, and then practice the skills you just learned by creating your personal Southwest Airlines poster.

Sunsets and Fishing Piers

There are always certain types of photos that we love and are drawn to. Personally I have always loved the sunsets over the ocean with a fishing pier in them. Many people would say they are cliché type post card shots, but I don't care. When people see the photographs I do of them, they love them. I sell quite a few prints of them. I also do them in note cards that are also quite popular. Having been born and raised in the mid-west, I only saw the oceans when I went on vacation. Fortunately my parents loved to travel and we always took some great vacations. If I would win the lottery someday, I would split my time between a home on a tropical beach, and a small ranch out west somewhere in the mountains.

Hanging out on a beach and watching a glorious sunset into the ocean is truly a relaxing experience for me. What most people miss is the best part of the show. As soon as the sun slips below the horizon, most people take off thinking the best part is over. Actually some of the most beautiful light and colors start then. There is a window of time, usually 10-20 minutes, when the sunlight is reflecting back into the sky over the curve of the earth and lighting the underside of the clouds. That is when you see the most vivid colors in the sky. This also applies to the sunrise before the sun comes up over the horizon, but the time frame for the best colors is much shorter.

Doing this type of photography is not very difficult, it just requires a little planning, some patience, and some basic equipment. I will usually scout out the scene an hour or so before sunset to see the angle, and where the sun will be going below the horizon in relation to what I am going to use as my main subject. I think about what I want the composition to look like and I will take a couple test shots hand held to see how it will look. Then it is a matter of waiting until the right light.

These are long exposure shots so the camera needs to be on a sturdy tripod. I use an electronic shutter release to trip the shutter. If you do not have a shutter release cable, you can use your camera's self timer to trip the shutter so you are not in contact with the camera. You want to avoid introducing any type of possible vibrations that might cause blurring. Since these are usually pretty long exposures, I do not use the mirror lockup feature like I would doing macro photography. I usually use the camera's evaluative metering system on the first shot and look at the results on the back of the camera. I usually then have to make adjustments depending on how the histogram looks. I either switch to manual mode and bracket the exposures, or I just use exposure compensation if it does not need much correction.

This last photo was not a sunset photo. This is a shot of the Sanibel Island Fishing Pier and Lighthouse taken about 15 minutes after the sun had set behind me. I wanted to catch the twilight night sky which is the blue to purple colors you get before the black night sky. Long exposures also tend to give everything a strong blue color cast anyway. This was shot from the causeway back to the mainland. I used a 500mm telephoto with a 1.4 extender to give me 700mm of focal length. This was about a 30 second exposure. I thought it made a unique looking photograph.