Category: Travel

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. It 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.

I uploaded the photos I took of the Las Vegas strip today. A bit disappointing. Lesson number one was about timing. I mean, I think pictures of Las Vegas have to be taken at night. Daylight and Las Vegas just don’t fit together in my mind. But I didn’t plan my time properly, so I didn’t take a single picture in that ideal hour immediately after sunset. To give you an example, compare this picture of Notre Dame de Paris and of Mandalay Bay Hotel.

You see the difference in that midnight blue? The picture from Paris I took just a few moments after sunset–maybe 20 minutes max. It’s so funny that that deep blue is called midnight blue, when the sky at midnight is just black and flat.
Anyway, you get the idea. I got some interesting pictures, but not quite as artistic as they could’ve been.

I also spent a lot of time on Fremont Street–that’s downtown Las Vegas and the historical center of the gambling industry in Las Vegas. You know, the cigarette smoking cowboy in neon? That’s on Fremont Street, where few high rollers go. The challenge with Fremont Street were the supports holding up the archway above the pedestrian area (not that anyone else will catch this, but this reminded me a great deal of the covering over the main shopping street in Damascus’ old walled town). While the supports were quite artistic, and almost natural looking, they really got in the way of my shots. It was easy enough to get a picture of one bright neon sign’ but to get two to provide a little bit of depth and perspective was damn hard.

What made it even more annoying were the security guards. Why do people assume that a tripod makes a professional photographer? Photography is perhaps the most popular hobby in the United States. I’ve seen estimates that 80 million households in the United States own a 35mm camera. If the average household is comprised of three people, that means that 80% of households in the United States has a camera. I’ll grant you that only a small proportion of them own expensive tripods that are over eight-feet tall when fully extended. But I was approached twice by security guards on Fremont Street informing me that commercial photography was prohibited. One of them actually threatened to sue me. Talk about a wonderful welcome from Las Vegas.

Judging by a tripod is actually pretty stupid. Judging by the size of the lenses on my camera–now that’s using your noggin. One of the best factors for determining the price and quality of a lens is the aperture width. The aperture, in case you didn’t know, is the opening inside the lens that lets light in to hit the film. The wider the aperture, the more light gets in, meaning you can use slower, higher-quality film with less light. But to have a wide aperture requires a wider lens, and that means more glass. Lots of expensive, photo-quality glass. but for a dumb security guard, paying attention to how big the lens on the camera body is will tell you either that the photographer is really rich, or is a pro. Needless to say, my long lense has an f-stop of 4.0 (5.6 at 300 mm). A pro would have an f-stop of 2.8 or below and a lens twice as large.

Okay, I should explain the switch between aperture width and f-stop. The f-stop is the focal length divided by the diameter of the aperture. So an f-stop of 4.0 with a focal length of 70 mm means that the aperture width is 17.5 mm. So why use f-stop rather than the actual aperture width? It’s just a matter of normalization. Each ‘stop’ represents a
halving of the light intensity from the one before, and hence a halving of the area of the pupil. in other words, it’s an effort to present a common measurement of light reaching the film (and the requisite shutter speed and aperture width) that is independent of the length of the lens (since the greater the magnification of the lens, the less light that reaches the film).

Anyway, to get back to the size-of-the-lenses issue, a long lens requires more light (the object is farther away), so the aperture has to be wider (where f=focal-length/aperture-width, as the focal-length increases, so must the aperture width to reach the same f value). So pro is likely to have a really big fat long lens. I realize that none of this made any sense.

The high-end hotels were actually much more accommodating. None of them bothered me with my camera at all.

But enough of my rant about the warm and accommodating security guards on Fremont Street.

The cloud forest itself was less photographically interesting to me. Though I was fascinated by the fill-me-ferns and the… shoot… I think it was a kind of bamboo. No. Shoot, I’ve forgotten but it has orange and black fruit the size of cranberries, the orange being unripe, but used to attract birds, while the black were edible.

The thing about fill-me-ferns was how they retained water. There were just these huge droplets of water held in place, not evaporating, not falling. I must have wasted two rolls. I even tried the flash, just to see if I got some extra light play.

I went back in the afternoon yesterday, too, but didn’t see anything of interest. I had one hell of a hike, racing against the light with my damned tripod over my shoulder. Didn’t want to get lost in the pitch black. No road like the first night.

Today, I went on a canopy tour with zip lines. It was a good deal of fun. I went early, so the group was small, just four others–newlyweds from Manhattan and a mom with her teenage son. They were pleasant. I mainly kept to myself, but the disingenuousness of the new wife was cute, the son was pleased with himself, and since his mom was being dragged along against her wishes, he didn’t seem embarrased, even when they took the last zip line together. It was sweet, actually.

I stuck around for the canopy walk, which was a little disappointing. I got, I hope, some decent shots of a dung beetle with little yellow antennae, three-pronged like a pitch-fork.

Just as I reached the last and longest suspension bridge of the walk, I heard the rumble of a howler, just ahead. I started to move cautiously across the bridge, eyes peeled at the canopy below and beside me. Nothing. Then I heard that low-throated rumble again, even closer ahead of me. I kept moving, prowling the trees with my binoculars. Nothing. And I wasn’t close enough to the source to traingulate. So I waited, staring into the canopy, probing, wishing. This was my only shot at getting a photo of a howler. I waited at the far end of the bridge so I could triangulate. I waited. And waited. Over an hour. In the sun. At noon. Without sunscreen. I got a burn, surprise, surprise. And never heard the howler again, let alone spot the critter. What a waste.

Had a frustrating Manuel Antonio experience. I spent four hours hiking and only saw an agouti. For maybe six seconds. Most interesting thing all morning were the spreading roots of a tree.

It was so amazing, the place was totally dead–as compared to yesterday when I was bumping into critters every few minutes. I did find the same pair (I think) of capuchin’s near Playa Gemala later in the morning, as well as a huge tribe of squirrel monkeys on the Punta Catedral trail just before I left the park. But damn what a frustrating day.

Still, it’s magical to see those monkeys so close to you, jumping from branch to branch, scrunching up those all-too-human faces.