My trip to Las Vegas the week of 25-MAR-06 for TheServerSide Java Symposium will be, I hope, my last for several years at least. Not my favorite place.
But I dutifully brought my camera and tripod along with me to capture a few pictures.
My first target was the skyline [click to enlarge]. I actually spotted a picture taken from some hotel or other in a travel guide, and was hoping to repeat it. The foreground had the curve of the hotel with yellow lines pointing into the Strip, which was a really nice guide. But I wasn’t sure what hotel it was. The Mandalay Bay, it turns out, has a restaurant at the top of one of their buildings, and it looked like they had those nice, directing lines.
So I went up at around 4:30 and camped out with a glass of wine, waiting for the sun to set and that beautiful, deep blue to suffuse the sky. Much to my surprise, the haze resulted in more of a deep purple than blue. And, as I looked down the Strip, I realized that the hotel I had been looking for was The Wynn. Not only did it have those directing lines, but it looked south-by-southeast, rather than north-by-northwest, meaning the cool colors would have been more pronounced from the Wynn than the spot I chose. Still, things turned out alright, I think.
My only other shot was completely unplanned. That same night, I lugged all my gear over to Caesar’s–after the pool party sponsored by Adobe, I figured I’d walk the Strip. As I walked over the pedestrian bridge between Caesar’s and the Flamingo, I couldn’t help but notice how strong the Flamingo’s neon sign reflected on the bridge’s glass walls. It was like the Flamingo was on top of the Bellagio.
As I’m setting up my tripod to take the shot, some random guy walks up to me and says "you know the problem with that shot is that you’re going to get the reflection of the neon lights in the picture."
I lifted one eyebrow and said, "yeah."
"Oh, wow, cool, that’s like a double-exposure or something!"