The problem of light in the night

Mirage_small_1
The only picture from The Strip that caught my interest at all was of
the volcano in front of the Mirage. I camped out at this hotel for 35 to 40 minutes, initially waiting for the "eruption" to start,
and then to snap pictures during the fairly lengthy eruption.
I think I
took a full roll attempting to capture a waterfall picture with the
interesting red lighting of the volcano. ItMirage_flame_small actually proved to be
a pretty tough shot.

Two reasons:

  1. The bursts of fire:
    These
    provided so much light that I could have taken a picture without the
    tripod. Anyway, with so much light, the smoothed waterfall effect
    disappeared.
  2. The Mirage hotel itself:
    I don’t know why I
    didn’t think of this before I started taking pictures, but I had a
    metering problem. I wanted to take a picture of a very dark object with
    dull red light. The problem was that right behind it was an object with
    better lighting, and a much brighter color of light (yellow). That
    second object was the hotel. So when I had pictures without flames, the
    hotel was overexposed, pulling attention away from the deep red light
    of the eruption. If I had just moved one or two hours clockwise, the
    Mirage would have been out of the frame, and my problem would have been
    solved.

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