Oakland to Fresno to Bakersfield to Mojave to Las Vegas to Boulder City to Hoover Dam to Death Valley to Lone Pine to Bishop to Mono Lake and all the Little Towns In between to Oakland
The Bellagio and Caesar’s Palace shot from the top of Paris, Las Vegas at sunset.
Piled the wife and kids into the Buick last Friday morning and headed out for open road. Spent 5 days pretty much shooting non-stop. Mostly focused on neon, especially in and around Las Vegas.
Some thoughts and highlights of the trip.
1. Bakersfield’s a magical place. Only the second time I’ve ever shot there but I have a feeling that I’ll be back many times in the future. Buck Owen’s Crystal Palace is something everyone should try at least once in their life. A good steak, big beers, and a wonderful performance by Buddy Allen Owens, Buck Owens’ son. Bigger country western stars come play there too. David Alan Coe was on the list as an upcoming act. The vintage neon in Bakersfield is remarkable. Some of the best in California. The Silver Fox, Guthrie’s Alley Cat, the Fox Theater. We stayed at the Marriott this time for something like $60 a night. Last time we stayed at the Doubletree. The Marriott’s probably the biggest hotel in this small town and I liked it better. They had photographs of Bakersfield neon in the rooms. 100 degree plus heat that felt great at night.
2. We stayed at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas, for also insanely cheap rates. I’ve stayed at the Strip plenty of times in the past, but never stayed on Fremont Street and wanted to shoot a lot of the older neon around that area. Saturday night was over $100, but Sun-Thurs was around $50 a night. The Golden Nugget probably has the best pool for kids in Vegas complete with a waterslide that goes through a shark tank. The wife and kids spent a lot of time at the pool while I was out around town shooting. I was warned about the Golden Nugget by a few in my family. My brother told me I’d be checking out after the first night. I have no idea what they are talking about. I liked staying there as much as anyplace else I’ve ever stayed in Vegas.
3. This was the first time that I really got off the Strip and spent significant time exploring broader Las Vegas. There are so many broken old motel signs. So many old broken people. There’s a significant homeless problem in Las Vegas. Encampments of them camped out in tents in Northern Las Vegas. They seem to keep it all away from the strip save an occasional panhandler or guy selling water on the bridge walkways between Strip casinos. You see a lot more of it though just South of Fremont Street where many of the old Vegas motels have become de-facto housing for the poor.
I ran into Steve down South of Fremont Street. My write up on him here. The neon sign for the Star View Motel being demolished.
4. The best meal we had was at the Mexican restaurant called Diego in the MGM Grand. A wonderfully modern designed place in red and spectacular Mexican Food. Be sure to order the guacamole which they have a guacamole person make for you in front of you adding in the ingredients that you’d like. We also had tacos at the Pink Taco at the Hard Rock which were very good as well.
5. I think that there are more billboards for lawyers in Las Vegas than anyplace else I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure why this is the case.
clockwise starting upper left: shooting silhouettes at the Bellagio Fountain, Death Valley, a reflection of the poolside shark tank/waterslide at the Golden Nugget, the Star View Motel being demolished
6. Boulder City is a charming little town and worth the drive south down below Vegas. It’s on the way to Hoover Dam and from what I understand largely prospered as a place for people building the dam to live way back when. I wanted to hit Boulder City to get many of the neon signs there. While I was there they were literally tearing down the old Starview Motel on the main drag with a backhoe. I got some photos of them tearing it down. It’s a great old vintage sign and another that is sure to be gone soon with the motel being torn down. Sometimes shooting these old neon signs feels like a race against time.
7. I was unimpressed by Hoover Dam. I’m not sure why exactly. It’s a spectacular work of architecture. It could have been the fact that I visited at probably the worst time to shoot it (high noon). I think it could be an interesting place to photograph early in the morning or in the evening closer to sunset.
The Lawless Shopping Center in North Las Vegas is similar in style to many of the smaller 50s-60s style vintage neon signs that can still be found in Las Vegas in areas off the Strip.
8. The trip up to the top of Paris, Las Vegas is worth the price. Find a two for one coupon in one of the freebie tourist brochures that are everywhere in Vegas. Plan ahead and try to get up there about a half hour before sunset in order to shoot the tail end of the sunset from up there. Thanks to Lee for suggesting this. I made it up there on the tail end of the sunset and missed probably some better shots if I’d gotten up there a half hour earlier.
9. This trip was the first time I’d been to Death Valley. It’s truly something. I wish I’d had more time to spend there. I’d love to shoot it at night someday. Deciding to take the long picturesque way home from Vegas, rather than the faster I-15 to I-5 way was my favorite thing about the trip. It made for a really long drive but there is so much natural beauty through Death Valley and the Sierras.
I processed just a couple of photos which I’ve included in this post. I’m so far behind on my processing and I’m not sure how exactly to deal with that problem. In all I took 7,444 frames over five days on this trip. More and more I’m seeing road trips like this as a model for the type of photography that I need to be doing.
The only problem with my level of shooting these days is that I’m shooting so much that my RAW undeveloped files are growing and growing and growing. Right now I’m working on processing images from last December and getting further and further and further behind. My thought though is that someday when I’m old and gray my body will begin to fail and my distribution of time will shift more towards processing and less towards shooting and maybe then I can catch up — although apparently photography Garry Winogrand died with 300,000 still unprocessed so I suppose that’s always a risk.
Anyways, many, many more photos in the months/years ahead from this trip.
You can see my bigger collection of photos taken in Las Vegas here.
A Slight Change of Plans
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The 2nd Annual Scott Kelby NAPP Adobe Worldwide Photowalk
I had a great time this afternoon hanging out with my Pal Tom Hogarty, Product Manager for Adobe Lightroom, on the 2nd Annual Scott Kelby NAPP Worldwide Photowalk in San Francisco. Tom led a great two hour walk around the Adobe’s San Francisco offices which included lots of modern architecture, old cars, graffiti, and some really cool warehouse grit that you find around Townsend Street there.
After the walk Tom and the staff at Adobe invited us into their offices for pizza and beer/soda and took questions and solicited feedback from the photowalk participants about Adobe products. Tom couldn’t really get into future plans for Lightroom specifically, but he did mention a few of his own personal favorite plug ins including something that I hadn’t heard of before called Mogrify. The plug in seems to be in part about watermarking and borders which I don’t use so I’m not sure it’s for me, but it was nice learning about that. Tom also took feedback from people in the room about what they’d like to see in the next version of Lightroom.
It was great shooting for a bit on the photowalk with my Pal Ivan Makarav from DMU on Flickr. Ivan is currently putting together a DMU photography magazine that I’m really excited to see develop. This is a magazine that I’ll be contributing my own photography to and will blog more about it once the first issue is out and available for purchase. I think it’s going to be about 60 pages and include a lot of the photographers that are currently participating in the Flickr DMU group.
It was also good to finally meet Stephan Shankland face to face. Stephan writes for CNET and has been a reporter I’ve admired for a long time. Stephen covers a lot of the photography and photo sharing tech stories and blogs at CNET’s Underexposed blog that you can read here. It’s definitely one you’ll want to follow if you are interested in good photography tech related reporting. Here’s a meta shot of Stephan from the walk.
It was also good to catch up with Ziv Gillat, one of the Founders of Eye-Fi. Eye-Fi is doing really interesting stuff with wifi and geolocational information built inside memory cards. Eye-fi recently came out with a new 4GB card for the Pro Photographer that for the first time writes RAW files for wireless delivery. I was excited to check out that card but haven’t tried it yet because they didn’t have a CF version of it out.
In addition to meeting and socializing with a bunch of other great photographers and Adobe staff I had a great time shooting myself. I found this old Ford car that was so much fun to shoot. I couldn’t figure out what kind of Ford it was. If anyone can identify it from my photos please let me know. I think it might be a Galaxie 500, but the emblem had been removed so I’m not sure. I also loved shooting the condominiums with all their crazy cloud reflections near the Adobe campus.
Thanks much to Tom Hogarty, and everyone at Adobe for hosting a fantastic walk today. I’m definitely looking forward to next year’s 3rd Annual Worldwide Photowalk. This photowalk by the way was held today in San Francisco was merely one of 900, yes 900, photowalks held all over the world. Here is a map of where all of the photowalks were held. You can learn more about this photowalk here.
You can see my complete set of images from this photowalk here.
She Was Standing By His Side
Softest One of All, Plate 2
American Without Tears, Plate 3
A Podcast Interview Robert Scoble and I Did With Photography Site F-Stop Beyond
My Pal Robert Scoble and I did a podcast interview with Ron Dawson over at F-Stop Beyond that just went up. It was an engaging conversation about a lot of different topics related to photography and online photography. We talk about how both Scoble and I got started in photography, talk about how Scoble and I met, as well as terms of service issues with photo sharing sites, censorship issues with photo sharing sites and definitely spend a bit of time on the show pimping our favorite site FriendFeed.
7 Ways FriendFeed Could Better Engage the Flickr Community
My friend Robert Scoble has a blog post out talking about the reasons why FriendFeed is not seeing the sort of growth that Twitter and Facebook are. Personally I consider FriendFeed to be a vastly superior platform to both Facebook and Twitter, but it is interesting noting that it does not seem to be getting the traction of these other services. That said, I think that there is a huge opportunity for FriendFeed to better engage a very large existing community that is Flickr and to offer power user sort of tools for Flickr’s most active users.
I’ve already written in the past about how I think the existing version of FriendFeed represents a superior way for people to browse Flickr than Flickr itself, but I think that FriendFeed could go a lot further and could definitely attract more (and super active) Flickr users if they improved things even more. So this list represents seven ways that I think FriendFeed could build a better way to engage with the Flickr Community. It should be noted that FriendFeed certainly is not, nor I’m sure wants to be, a replacement for the Flickr community. Rather I see FriendFeed as a way for power users to get even more out of Flickr than they already get today.
I should also note that I’m not 100% sure exactly how many of these features could be implemented via the Flickr API but know that the Flickr API is somewhat robust and would think that some of the items below might be possible.
1. Exponentially more important than anything else FriendFeed could do in relation to Flickr (and my current number one FriendFeed feature request), I think FriendFeed should allow an option to import all of your Flickr contacts into FriendFeed like they currently do with your Twitter and Facebook contacts. I know that there are people on FriendFeed who are my Flickr contacts that I’m not presently following. I know that they are out there and would follow them if I could. FriendFeed needs to allow you to scan your Flickr account and auto-add any existing Flickr contact as a FriendFeed contact. This seems like very basic FriendFeed/Flickr integration missing today.
2. Allow you to automatically set up imaginary friends in a “Flickr Contacts” specific list for Flickr contacts who are not on FriendFeed yet. This option would ensure that you could get all of your Flickr contacts photos over to FriendFeed which represents a superior way to browse your contact’s photos as it includes more than just the last 1 or 5 of their photos and it also includes their faves. Combined with matching up with your existing joint FriendFeed/Flickr contacts this would represent a complete way to better recreate one of Flickr’s most popular pages the “photos from my contacts” page. Auto subscribing to these RSS should be possible. FriendFeed should take this one step further though by automatically replacing an imaginary friend contact with an actual contact when this person joins FriendFeed.
3. Allow an option on FriendFeed to see when a Flickr contact creates a group thread. This technology is sorely missing at Flickr right now and many times you may have a high value contact start a thread in a Flickr group that you don’t know anything about. You miss an entire conversation. By creating a FriendFeed entry to coincide with every contact’s new group post on Flickr you would be notified when this happens and you could then go to that group thread to participate. The top 10% of Flickr users represent a disproportionate amount of Flickr’s traffic. These users are the ones that are most engaged in the groups on Flickr. Groups are where the truly hardcore Flickr users live. By adding this functionality on FriendFeed you’d be creating a tremendous tool currently lacking at Flickr that would engage many people who are 24/7 type web junkies on Flickr.
4. FriendFeed currently gets the Flickr RSS feed wrong. For a while they were presenting it correctly but not for the past few months. On Flickr, hardcore users that post photos there are very cognizant of the order that they post their photos in. Because Flickr only shows your contacts the last 1 or 5 photos, Flickr users generally make sure that when they do a batch upload that their last one or five photos are the best of that batch upload. FriendFeed conversely reports Flickr RSS streams *backwards* — that is they show the first 7 photos uploaded in a batch on your FriendFeed feed *burying* anything beyond that. This means that the photos that I am showing on Flickr as my best in any batch upload are buried 100% of the time on FriendFeed. That’s discouraging to Flickr users and since they used to do it correctly before, I’m not sure why they can’t fix that.
5. Flickr mashup searching streams. There are certain images on Flickr that I’m interested in and do regular searches for. graffiti AND sanfrancisco, neon AND california, thomashawk, etc. FriendFeed should figure out a way to build RSS feeds with these searches and then let me create a sort of custom search feed that constantly scours for the subjects that I’m most interested in.
6. Filter by faves. FriendFeed should see if there is a way to create feeds from Flickr based on favoriting activity. I’d love to have a feed for instance that showed me all of my flickr contacts’ photos with 1 fave or more, 5 faves or more, 10 faves or more, etc. You get the idea.
7. Best of Day Flickr. FriendFeed needs a page where they show the “Best of Day” amongst FriendFeed members’ Flickr photos. Flickr’s Explore page is crappy. It’s a subjective page full of blah photos generally speaking. FriendFeed should allow you to filter your Flickr Contacts photos by absolute numbers of faves on a daily basis. I’d love to be able to see my Flickr contact’s daily uploads organized this way.
If you want to follow me on FriendFeed you can follow me here. If you want to follow me on Flickr you can follow me here.