There comes a time in every vacation when it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with the action in the blog. That's where I am now.
I played a little poker last night. Surprise. I was going to play at the Mirage where there is a nightly 5:00 PM tournament. There were only a dozen registered when I asked, a few minutes before the start time. I passed on that and headed across the street to the Venetian.
There was a time when the Mirage was the hotel for poker. All the big games took place here. But when Steve Wynn built Bellagio he moved the higher stakes games there. Sure Mirage expanded the room during the poker boom, but it's not the leader it once was.
The Venetian has a 7:00 PM tournament and there were 82 entrants. Nine would cash out. I finished 12th. Sigh.
Helaine was really bushed and went to bed early. I picked up Clicky and headed down to The Strip. Though I've brought five lenses, I left the backpack upstairs, screwed a 10-20mm Sigma on my camera and headed out with my trip and the thought of doing some HDR photography. HDR works best where there are huge differences between the brightest brights and darkest darks.
The first three HDR shots I've processed are attached to the bottom of this entry.
Las Vegas Boulevard was dead last night around midnight when I headed out. This is the slow season.
The people you meet in the hotels and see on Las Vegas Boulevard are different. The hotels are intimidating and not necessarily family friendly. The Strip, on the other hand, is open-to-all and full of free entertainment. There are families and groups of people representing any ethnicity you can think of. And everyone has a camera. I've written about this before, but it bares repeating--nowadays everything is documented. Cameras are ubiquitous.
We're in our last twenty four hours. Still more to do.
Nice picture of the Imperial Palace! You got the shot my wife couldn't. We stayed there in October while I was at an EMS convention. The seem to be a little more generous with comps there. I got four food comps over the course of my stay.
John -
I like that one a lot too. It is an HDR photo--three images combined, each exposed for different light. Then the dynamic range is 'squished.' That's why you can see detail in the bright lights and the dark road surface. In fact all three of these shots are HDR using Qtpfsgui, a freeware HDR program.