What Happens in Vegas. . .

. . .ends up in this blog.

As I have been touting for quite some time, I recently had a "work conference" in Las Vegas.  No, really, I did.  There is a joint chapter conference co-hosted by the Southwest and Northwest chapters of the Marketing Research Association that is held each year in Las Vegas. It is, of course, a lot of fun, but it is also fairly educational as well.   The conference runs Tuesday through Thursday afternoon(s).  Given, a) the difficulties of getting an early flight TO Vegas, and b) that it was significantly cheaper to fly out on Monday than Tuesday, I decided to leave a day early.  This, conveniently gave me a free evening/night in Vegas, alone, with no baby. . .Hehe, allright.

Vegas is only a few hours from one of the last remaining dark sky sites in the US, Death Valley National Park so I figured I would use my free night to go out and try my  hand at night sky photography.

I arrived in Vegas, picked up my car (yep, it is cheaper to rent a car for 3 days than it is to take a taxi to/from the airport) and hit the open road. The plan was to start at Rhyolite, an old ghost town just outside the National Park, kill time there until the rise of the Milky Way around 2 AM, then head to the national park and get some Milky Way shots.

The drive out was long, but also a little amusing. Turns out that Highway 95 runs "right by" Area 51.  By "right by" I mean 2 hours away, but it is about as close as you can get without risking black helicopters and men with guns stopping you, but I digress.  There is an Area 51 themed truck stop in the Amargosa Valley, naturally I had to stop and check it out.

This was as close as I came to seeing any aliens

It was pretty cool inside.  I highly recommend going in. About three-quarters of the truck stop is dedicated to memorabilia, trinkets, touristy stuff, etc.  There is also a truck stop dinner there, but sadly it was closed.  Too bad because I was really hungry. I spent about an hour looking around at all of the stuff and eventually purchased an Area 51 "no trespassing" sign and a brothel themed shot glass.  "What's that?" you ask.  "A BROTHEL themed shot glass?!!?"  Yep, turns out that the truck stop is attached to a brothel, appropriately named the "Alien Cathouse".

I wonder if the hookers are little and green?

After a photo and a chuckle, back on the road. I should note that it is a bit disconcerting when, already in the middle of nowhere, the locals have no idea where you are going.  I asked for directions/distance to Rhyolite and everyone just said "where?".   Fortunately, it wasn't that far away.  While Google Maps says it is 40 minutes, I don't think Google realizes that the highway is pretty much abandoned, smooth, great visibility, and FAST (posted NIGHTTIME speed limit was 75mph). I made it to Rhyolite in a little under half an hour.

I wasn't sure what I wanted to do while there.  I knew it was a ghost town and had a few crumbling buildings, but it was REALLY dark and I couldn't see anything.  As I drove through "town" I saw something reflect my headlights off to the right so I backed up and found a little road/parking lot.  It was an old, rusted out truck. . .PERFECT.  I set up shop and hung out here for a few hours.

A few interesting things to note, this shot was taken looking Southwest.  LAX and Bakersfield are directly behind the truck (and a few hundred miles away) from this vantage point. For quite some time, every picture I took had airplanes running through them as they approached LAX.  However, around 11 pm, nearly all air traffic stopped so I was able to get several clear pictures.

Lonely

An old, abandoned truck in Rhyolite, NV

I took the above picture using the Rokinon 14mm.  After a while I wanted to switch things up and try a different perspective so I grabbed the "nifty-fifty" and set up for another series of shots.

Rollin'
Same truck, different perspective

This was fun to shoot and boring to shoot at the same time. Star trails take time. . .a lot of time.  After getting the focus dialed in, I set everything up to take 30 second exposures continuously for a little over an hour.  That was the boring part.  The fun part was the light painting. A few things to note: the caretaker's quarters were behind me and there were some outside lights. These light up the truck "naturally" so I didn't have to do anything there. I was shooting wide open with "nifty-fifty" (f/1.8) so it has a very shallow range of focus, the stars were in focus, but the truck was blurry as hell (this isn't a problem on the Rokinon 14mm because that thing has an insane depth of field).  I knew at a minimum that I would have take additional shots focused on the truck then stack them on top of the star fields, otherwise there would be pretty stars and blurry truck.  Since I was shooting "truck exposures" anyway, I decided to have some fun.  I turned my headlamp on red, shoved it in my flash diffuser and placed it around the truck.  The truck in the "Rollin'" shot is a composite of three photos: light in the cab, light in the engine compartment, and light behind the rear tire.

I have done star trails before, but have always been a bit dismayed by the way they turned out.  There are little gaps between each exposure (even though the shutter is technically only closed for a second or two) and I have also noticed that they sometimes look "stuttery". I did some reading and discovered a new way to process star trails. A guy named Floris Van Breugel created a custom script for Photoshop called the Star Trail Stacker that is supposed to eliminate gaps in star trails and I decided to try it out.  It did a really good job!  I am very impressed.  However, you may notice two gaps in the shot above.  These are due to a truck driving through my shot a few times.  Actually, the truck drove through the shot about 8 times in all, but most of them were far enough away that it didn't have much impact. . .twice he came right through the shot, and one of those times he pulled up behind me, flipped on his light bar (you know the kind people put on those big trucks) and lit up the entire scene for nearly a minute before honking and driving away. . .jerk. Anyway, I had to remove three frames from the sequence which is why there are gaps.

After the truck I drove around a bit more and found the old bank building, which is nothing more than a shell of a building.  Really cool. I set up and took a few shots here.

Polar Opposite
14mm

Stark Relief
50mm

I wasn't really planning on doing a star trail shot (hence why the trails are so short), but while in post I decided to see what it would look like if I tried.  I immediately noticed that the trails curve in opposite directions toward each corner.  I was confused for a moment then it hit me that I was facing almost due west and the wide field of view afforded by the 14mm means I nearly caught both "poles" in the frame.  This was a lucky accident.  Now that I know this is possible I want to try and set things up so that I somehow do capture both poles and do a longer exposure time to really highlight the trails.

The lighting came courtesy of yet another "security" light. However, this light was not as kind as the first one (truck).  Even though it was pretty far away (quarter mile or so), it was pretty garish and came in at a terrible angle.  I encountered some rather severe chromatic aberration in the form of pretty extreme green fringing on both of these shots.  Fortunately, we have YouTube and a quick search yielded me this video which introduced the Gaussian filter approach.  It still took a fair amount of work (especially on the 14mm shot) but I was able to get rid of most of the CA.

By the time I finished shooting the building it was a little after 1:30 AM. The Milky Way was supposed to be rising, but some clouds were coming in from the south, blocking the stars near the horizon.  I had two choices: a) drive into Death Valley, find an interesting spot and stay up until 4:30 AM hoping I could catch the Milky Way before the sun came up, or b) drive back to Vegas.  It was late, I was tired, I have been up/traveling since 7:00 that morning, and I had a conference to attend the next day.  I chose option B. The drive back to Vegas was uneventful and I made it to my hotel room around 5:30 AM, realized I left my phone charger in the car, had to walk through the casino, then through the Miracle Mile shopping plaza to get the damn thing, then walk all the way back, ugh.

The conference began on Tuesday, and that evening was the welcoming reception, held at the base of the High Roller.  The plan was to go to the reception then wander around taking night shots of Vegas after it was over. If you have ever been to Vegas you would know that everything is really far apart, so rather than going to the reception then back to the hotel to grab my camera gear I decided to just bring all of my gear with me. This, naturally?, got me nominated to be the "official" conference "photographer".  Why the quotation marks?  Because it wasn't really official in any real sense of the word.  Rather the SWMRA president saw that I had a camera and said, "hey, if you take pictures I will give you some extra drink tickets."  Sure!

I have never really been a fan of people in my pictures, so being asked to take pictures OF people was a little off putting, but it was fun.  While I have pictures of people posing, and looking at the camera, I quickly came to realize that I prefer taking candid shots of people just being people, preferably NOT looking at the camera.  All-in-all I enjoyed myself and even set up a "photo booth" with the Venetian serving as the backdrop.  I won't bore you with all of the people pictures.  Rather I have selected a few of my favorites to display below.

Some of these are from the STS party the following evening.  You can tell by the venue.

Lightroom
I caught the lights as they were changing color

Whose Got Big Balls?
Vegas reflected off a gondola "ball" on the High Roller

De-Feeted
The only group shot in which I appear

De-Feeted 2
Same shot, in color. Which do you prefer?

I need a selfie like I need a hole in my head
Took this while testing exposure/flash for the Venetian background.

This is actually my favorite picture of the evening

I've got big balls!
Vegas from the top of the world

I think I can see my house from here
7 shot panorama taken from the High Roller

The Last. . .um. . party?
I really like this. It was taken from partway down the hallway.  The walls and ceiling do a great job framing the scene and the green couches really POP. 

Cheers
Just a festive shot

Reflections
How did I take this without being in the reflection?

Up
Not sure how I feel about this.  thought it was interesting at the time

Eccentrica Gallumbits
The triple-breasted whore of Eroticon Six

If you managed to stay with me for this long then you get two bonus shots.  I mentioned that I wanted to do some blue hour / night shots of Vegas.  Well due to time and distance, I was limited to shooting. . the Bellagio fountain.  I know, I know, it is over shot, but it was still fun.  The first photo was taken after the welcome reception at close to midnight.  I started by taking a base exposure of around 20-30 seconds to get smooth water and then to bring out some of the colors.  When the show started I spent a minute or so playing around with my exposure.  I wanted to make sure that it was fast enough to capture the water, slow enough to get enough of the water/show a bit of movement, and wide enough to allow in enough light so you could see the water.  I settled on roughly half-second exposures.  Once that was determined, I held down the shutter button for the duration of the show.  For processing, I sorted through to find what I thought was the most interesting water shot, stacked it on the base shop then simply went to blend-->lighten. Boom

Liquid Ballet

I wanted something a bit different for the second fountain shot (taken the next day). After the sessions ended I ran outside to scout a location for blue hour.  I was pretty sure I wanted something with a bit of elevation, from the side, rather than straight on.  I found the perfect spot that also provided a panorama.  I got there and got set up right as one show was ending (around 7:30ish).  I started by taking a 5-shot blue hour panorama of the North strip. I again went with slightly longer exposures (5-10 seconds) because I wanted depth of color, smoother water, and maybe a bit of movement from the cars (wasn't really thinking about that).  Then. . .I waited. . .for half an hour. It turns out that prior to 8 PM, the Bellagio fountain only goes off once every 30 minutes, ugh.  Once the fountain started it was the same as the night before, quickly adjust settings and take a whole bunch of pictures.

Vegas Baby!!

Processing this shot was much more difficult for a variety of reasons.  The first was that I started with a panorama that included the fountain, then had to re-position the camera on the fountain and take the picture of the show. Obviously, I wasn't able to re-position the camera exactly as it was when I took the initial frame for the panorama, but I got it pretty damn close.  So, in post, after picking the fountain shot I wanted, I had to align the images, but needed to keep the base image still (typically Photoshop moves/distorts both images when auto-aligning. After some fiddling around and a lot of Google-foo, I managed to make it happen.  Then, I couldn't just use blend-->lighten because some parts of the base exposure were brighter than some parts of the fountain, so I had to play around with that a bit to make what I want show where I wanted it.  Then I had to deal with stitching the panorama together, which is actually a bit difficult when it contains moving objects such as cars pulling up to the stop light. So, there was a fair bit of manual aligning for the panorama too.  All-in-all I think it turned out fairly well, but it was a lot of work.

Taking Advantage of Vantage Rocks

When Kyra was pregnant with Andrew, I scheduled a Manshower which became known as the "shitty backpack."  It was a four day trip to the Three Sisters Wilderness just outside Bend, OR and served as my first real introduction to astrophogography.  The infamous Jack was along for the trip and was the one who gave me my first (and pretty much all subsequent) astrophotography lessons.

Apparently I STARTED a blog about the "shitty backpack" but didn't finish/post it, you know, the whole had a baby and moved since thing (ugh, how long can I use that as an excuse?). Que Sera Sera. While I go back and review said blog you can read Jack's version of events to get familiar with it.

My First Time
If this was /r/Gonewild, it would look MUCH different

When we found out that Jack's wife was pregnant, we immediately started planning his Manshower. We started with grand ideas of flying to Fairbanks to get Aurora pictures, traveling to the desert Southwest to get Milky Way pictures, and even briefly thought of leaving the United States.  But alas, time and money were not on our side so we opted to spend an evening at Vantage Rocks in eastern Washington (otherwise known as Frenchman Coulee).

Jack had recently purchased a star tracker, and I tried making my own (a la this method) and we were both looking forward to trying out our purchase/creation.  Alas, none of it worked for either of us, it turns out that polar alignment is hard, even with a polar alignment scope (Jack) and nearly impossible without one (me).

I did however figure out that if I ran my tracker "backwards" that I would get really cool star trails in a very short period of time as you will see below.

As are most of my star trips, this one was another learning experience.  Things learned:
1) Star trackers are hard to set up and get right.
2a) High ISO produces lots of noise
2b) You need high ISO to do any star pics at greater than 50mm
2c) Therefore, any "zoom" pics are noisy as hell
2d) For some reason the "median" stack method for fixing noise isn't working. . .I'll keep trying
3) The solution is a star tracker, but
3a) They are expensive (well for someone who just purchased a house and just had a baby they are)
3b) Making them is fun, but I don't know if I did it correctly


Enough is enough: Here are some pictures.

This was not taken by reversing my star-tracker.  This was an old-fashioned "snap and stack".  I can't recall the number of exposures, but it was a stack of several 4 minute exposures, each at 200 ISO over the course of about 90 minutes.  After that was done I lit up the foreground using a headlamp and a light diffuser.  The foreground is a composite of about 6 shots, about 30 seconds each, also at ISO 200.  For each shot I stood in a slightly different spot to illuminate a different side of the rocks.

After initially processing this I discovered a nifty way to process star trails that gets rid of gaps so that it looks much smoother.  For comparison sake, I'm posting both shots and labeling them.  I ended up having to process them differently so they came out quite different.  Which one do you like more?  Which aspects of which one do you like and which aspects of which one do you NOT like?  Let me know in the comments.

Vantage Star Trails - no gap fix.

Vantage Star Trails - Gap Fix
(I also processed it differently)

We played around the pillars for a while, spending more time than we should trying to take a climbing picture (must try again, it WILL be really cool).  Jack managed to get a few additional decent shots from here, but I wasn't able to.  I was playing with the 70-200 lens and had to crank up the ISO to high and couldn't correct for it in post.

At one point I couldn't find Jack, so I was alone, in the middle of nowhere, and it was just then that the coyotes decided to start crying. . .I may, or may not, have been a bit jumpy.

After a while we drove a ways and hopped out of the car to go for a little hike.  It was around a mile before we found a nice place from which to hopefully get some Milky Way shots.  It started to cloud over, we were getting some light pollution (apparently we hiked to right next to I-90) and I was getting a bit bored so I was goofing off a bit, but got one decent shot.

See, one decent shot

GOD OF WAR (back to goofing off)

Remember me mentioning a star tracker at the beginning?  Remember me mentioning that it didn't work very well because I couldn't figure out how to do proper polar alignment.  Well, this is what happens if you turn the thing on BACKWARDS and run it for 5 minutes.  Yep, that's me, standing on the top of the ridge.  I stood there for the entire exposure, then about 10-15 seconds before the shutter closed I turned on the light up Frisbee, did some sort of Ninja moves then tossed the thing toward the camera.  Between quick star-trails and the UFO look, the effect is pretty cool with the combination .  I'm sure I will find a good use for this in the future.  

Space(d) Invader!!!

Well, that's it for this episode.  I DID go to Las Vegas / Death Valley (well, near it) last week.  I'm done processing those pictures and should have the blog post written in the next few days. In the mean-time, I forgot to share one of my favorite pictures from our December trip to Idaho Falls.  Enjoy!

Christmas Lights
(Apparently this is a memorial which means it may be on all year.  I am heading to Idaho Falls in July and if this is still lit up I will try doing something fun.)