Photo walk and waterfalls

Las Vegas is full of glitz and glamor. Some would call it gaudy.

One book I read described it as seeing a debauched showgirl in the morning light.

But a recent article in the paper made me think about how even though some of the negative connotations about Las Vegas might or might not be true, Las Vegas is still a beautiful city - at least parts of it are.

How many other cities offer the opportunity to transport you, in spirit , to ancient Egypt, the Caribbean, New York City, Paris, Rome, or let you see the Knights of the Realm in just a few miles? None that I can think of.

So it was with that mindset that I was reading Scott Hargis' blog about architectural photography. He had a video tutorial on straightening your verticals in Photoshop. I decided I wanted to try his method, as well as many of the other opinions mentioned in the comments of that post.

The first thing I needed was pictures of buildings that weren't straight. Not that the camera wasn't level when the picture was taken, but the natural distortion of the light traveling through a lens made of curved pieces of glass.

I had all sorts of great ideas from looking through pictures of Las Vegas on Flickr, so Monday I hopped into my truck and headed down to the strip.

My first stop was to get a few shots of the City Center project next door to the Bellagio and Monte Carlo. City Center has been in the news a lot lately. They had a big problem with safety at the site, and several workers have been killed. The Las Vegas Sun won a Pulitzer for their stories on the safety problems. One of the craziest problems is highlighted in the Harmon Tower.
The tower was about half of its planned height when someone finally noticed all the structural steel had been constructed upside down before being encased in concrete. None of the on site inspectors, or the county building inspectors noticed, and they had to do x-ray images of the columns to verify it. The designers decided to halt construction where they were, in the interests of safety (and the real estate market had collapsed, so this gave them half as many units to try and sell). Any way, it's just a stubby tower.
I love how you can see the reflection of the Bellagio in the glass of the tower.

From City Center I headed over to the Venetian
The Venetian is very cool. The tower, the Gondoliers, the murals in the hotel lobby. It is all amazing!

I picked the Venetian because it would give me a chance to practice taking some detail shots too.

Detail shots aren't the type of photograph that goes on the cover of a magazine, but they give you the sense of actually being someplace in person, and being able to notice the little things that get lost in the "big picture."My other motive for the Venetian was the fact that it is connected to the brand new Palazzo. I have watched the Palazzo go from being a flat piece of dirt, to a very deep hole, to its current shape, but I had never been inside.

I've got to say, its pretty cool inside too! Just Outside of Barney's is this huge waterfall. It's hard to get a sense of the size, but the copper leaves are easily 10 feet across
Speaking of water falls, this was my big find of the day:
I had been to the Wynn several times, but never noticed the waterfalls they have there!
I actually did get a chance to take pictures of the buildings too.

You can see very clearly here what I mean when I talk about straight verticals. The building is obviously straight in real life, and the edge of the photo has got to be straight, but the building touches the side of the picture at the bottom, but is far away at the top.

Its just one of those funny things that happens. They have special lenses called a tilt shift, or perspective control lens. They are insanely expensive(this one is a little over $1900), are fixed focal length (no zoom), and have a limited use. But if you think you might want to get me something nice for Christmas...

I loved the water falls at the Wynn so much that I went back to see them in the dark.


I had planned to try out the photoshop techniques this weekend, but I was reminded I have a BIG project on Monday and I wanted to get some practice in before I had to do it for real, so I will fix them so all the buildings look straight and tall and not about to fall over, but it will be a few days. At least I have the raw materials!