Rainy Day On The Strip
Nikon D80 10-24mm @ 13mm ISO 400 1/30 f/5.6 (-2.0 0.0 +2.0) hand held Lr3 HDR Efex Pro
For all I know, it was the wettest week on record in Las Vegas this week. We had intentions of capturing some images on a visit to the Valley of Fire state park and the Nevada State Railroad Museum, but due to the weather, we were captive in the casino. The MGM West Tower is in the left foreground, the Mansion at the MGM Grand in the middle right foreground, Excaliber in the left background, New York New York in the middle background, the Monte Carlo in the right background; the south end of City Center on the right edge of the background. Las Vegas Boulevard, the “Strip” delineates the foreground from the background. The shot was taken on the 25th floor of the north end of the MGM Grand Tower.
I had a Hell of a time with reflections off the window, what appears to be streaking in the left foreground is actually a reflection of the window curtains, despite having all of the lights turned off in the room, the ambient light from outside the hotel bounced off the curtains and reflected back in the glass. I really would have liked to have a polarizing filter with me for this shot, but I do have it on good authority that a polarizer will show up in my stocking tomorrow morning. I diminished some of the reflection damage by using the Lightroom cloning tool on the sky.
I took some other shots of the skyline, both in daylight and at night, and some other interiors in the hotel, but I am not very happy with any of them. Besides being disappointed with my images, we were disappointed by the cost of everything, including all meals in the hotel, the unfathomable add on charges to the basic room rate, the extremely tight slot machines (not a factor to me, I did not gamble) and the irony of being booked in to a vaunted spa suite and finding we had no water pressure the first morning, and apparently the maids service the rooms on some undefined schedule, known only to them, and not in response to your specific phone request for service.
This is not the same Las Vegas my parents would bring me to in the 1950’s, way overpriced and over crowded. I think we are done with Vegas.
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