BlackHat US2006: Misc. pictures from around Las Vegas

[foxgrrl]

Instead of sleeping off my cigarette smoke induced migraine, fortune had placed me upon the top of the Augustus Tower of Caesar's Palace &mdash How I got up there is another story. Since I probably would never be there again; I had to take this opportunity to shoot a few photos. This was the first time I had a chance to really do nighttime city photography since I switched from slide film to digital.

Now, I'm a strong adherent to the belief that it's the photographer that produces good photos, not the camera gear. If you're a good photographer, you can take a good looking photo with anything. That being said, I'm using a ten megapixel digital SLR with some very sharp lenses. See if you can spot the highway sign on I-15N for the "Spring Mtn Road West" and "Sprint Mtn Road East" exits. If you can read any license plates, I'll give you a star — not a gold star, a giant ball of incandescent gas, millions of light-years away from Earth.

Bonus points if you can spot the technical mistakes I made at the time I was shooting these. (There are two different kinds, on several photos.) Yes, even professional camera gear won't help you take perfect photos if you don't use it right.

These photos are essentially as-is from the camera – no retouching – they have been converted from raw into JPEG format. Most of these were shot with the intention of stitching them together into a very wide panorama at some time in the future. I don't have the resources to do this right now, but if anyone else reading this wants to do that, I can provide uncompressed copies of these images.

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Date: August 2, 2006
Location: +36° 6′54.36″, -115° 10′27.56″

Photo Shoot Location
Photo Shoot Location from Space!

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Comments

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't bet money on it, but I think the plate in 2498 (upper right, on the car in front of the van) is probably readable in the raw version, with a bit of tweaking.

[wolphin.livejournal.com]

I would go for the plates in 2514, nicely lit by the cars behind, but I'd like to see a raw format instead of a jpeg before deciding. I was hoping the cart in 2945 had plates, thought I would have got my star, but unfortunately its only got a flag :(

[catwoman69y2k.livejournal.com]

Im in Vegas too for this weekend (or what was left of the weekend)...wish I had known so we could of hung out.

[kitten-goddess.livejournal.com]

One mistake:

About a third of the photos are so dark I can barely see anything. The rest are awesomely gorgeous, as always!

[oygevalte.livejournal.com]

Lessee... I'm thinking you were spot metering in some of those underexposed shots. Should have been able to take care of a lot of that in your raw converter, though, and pushing RAW files can me made reasonable by using a proper set of profiles in Neat Image (I swear by that software)... There's also some quite noticeable parallax on some of the tilt up/down shots, which may or may not be considered a "flaw" depending on what you were after (in architectural photography, that would be death; I happen to use the effect a lot on, say, huge redwoods as it really conveys a sense of scale).

If you want to burn a CD and USPS it up here, I have a slightly old but workable Capture One DSLR installation (handles D50 photos okay...) and a copy of 3DVista Stitcher 3.0 which usually does a decent job, although it's not exactly QuickTimeVR or anything. Especially on my only machine... a 1.2 Ghz PIII laptop.

Okay, you can stop laughing now. No, really. Hell, even with the broken screen and keyboard, it was better than my last machine -- a 1 Ghz Slot A Athlon. I is po'.

[foxgrrl]

I probably should have stated that, I underexposed some of these on purpose, otherwise they would have lost all color. Also, kitten_goddess's comment reminded me: I processed these on a Mac, so I've been viewing them with a gamma setting of 1.8, Windows/Linux is displaying them with a gamma setting of 2.2 — hence, everything is much darker.

And yeah it's sort of a third technical flaw that I was mentioning to casidhe in person, that I wasn't rotating the camera around the exact focal point, so that whoever stitches these together is going to need to correct for that. I was thinking of two other problems, that aren't really very visible in the images at the tiny 400px size. (I don't think that I did all of the panoramas at 50mm either, but I didn't change focal lengths or exposure during the set — This is also why some frames are underexposed.)

My previous two machines were an AMD K6-2, and a i486DX2.

[oygevalte.livejournal.com]

Okay. :) I can usually manage to make a stitched image look decent with a little cut-and-paste if there are alignment issues, but yeah, it'll never be "perfect".

I am going to take a stab in the dark here and guess that you weren't running Windows on either of those machines, the way I am (XP on this sad old hunk of crap). ;) None of my software runs on anything except Windows or OS X (and frankly, I'll take Winders for my ability to delve into its innards without a BS in xNix).