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.

City Skylines

Photographing city skylines at night is a real challenge if you want to get a really good photograph. First you need to find a great vantage point to create a good composition. Then you need just the right light to balance your sky against your foreground, and not blow out all the lights. Since I have always done these with just one shot, it is a matter of shooting several shots as the sky gets progressivly darker. You can make adjustments in Photoshop or some other editing program, but you can only fix so much. The big thing in digital photography is now HDR. This stands for High Dynamic Range.  In simple terms, you take anywhere from 3 to 7 exposures and bracket with over and under exposures. This captures all the detail in the brighest lights, and all the detail in the darkest shadows. This data is then brought into Photoshop and it blends all this data together to create the image. There is a seperate software called Photomatix that processes these tpes of merged files even better than Photoshop does. I have the software now and have just started experimenting with this type of photography.

Living very close to St. Louis gives me a good skyline to practice on. These are long exposure shots were a tripod and cable release are mandatory. The worst thing about these are being down on the East St. Louis riverfront after dark. A nasty crime ridden place. I have observed river rats bigger that small dogs.

Here is a skyline scene I did of Nashville TN. from my last trip there. I was on an old bridge that had been converted to a bicycle and foot traffic only bridge. That is the Cumberland River that winds around the city of Nashville. I had to wait for the sun to get down far enough below the skyline to bring out the colors and cloud detail. These really are about patience and timing.

This is a panoramic scene of the Chicago IL. skyline all the way out to the end of Navy Pier. This is 12 vertical photos stitched together in Photoshop. I had never tried to do one of these at night. I was in Chicago for a seminar so I went out to the Adler Planetarium and shot it from there. I waited until the sun got down to the left side of the photo, but you can see the dramatic falloff of light across the city as the sun is now below the horizion at this point. I felt it was OK for a first attempt, but I need a lot more practice. If you click on any photo they will open in another window so you can see them a little better.