Advice for shooting in vegas

[bigvb]

Hey guys im heading to Vegas in 2 weeks. I bought myself a Canon1000d with kit lense a few months back, so i can take some nice snaps this summer on my travels.

For vegas, i have two general photo types.

1) Outdoor landscape/panoramic shots of strip generally during the day (maybe a few at night)
2)Inside casinos, taking pictures of friends playing etc... (i assume this is allowed in vegas)

Any advice to a first time amateur would be appreciated. I know the basics of photography, aperture, shutter speed, WB, i tend to struggle with exposure, and i often find my images are not rich in colour.

Cheers guys.


p.s. should i get a polarizing filter for vegas?


VB

[alanS]

But surely all exposure is is a mix of aperture and shutter speed for the set ISO as indicated by the little exposure meter you see when you look through the viewfinder?

Maybe the lack of punch to your pictures is something other than exposure?

All I'd suggest is that it may be worthwhile shooting RAW and processing the shots with the RAW conversion software you got with the camera. What you can then do is export the file as a JPEG or TIFF and then do more tweaking if you feel like it.

DSLR shots tend to look a little flat and not as initially punchy and ready to print as shots from a compact as it is assumed that the photographer will process the shots on their pc. Although I'm not familiar with the latest DSLR's, and they may well produce more print ready shots than my ageing DSLR, I suspect that you still may need to do some processing to get the best from them.

PS - A pol filter will help with blue skies and the like.

[john_g]

Yes - shooting in RAW will help with high-contrast scenes such as you are likely to find at night where there are lots of bright lights as well as areas of relative darkness.

Also, I'd want to take a tripod for night-time exposures; if you bump up the ISO setting instead you will lose significant quality, and hand-holding isn't likely to produce good images either. If a tripod is impractical, a small bean-bag can be used to rest the camera on, provided you use the delayed shutter release.

Finally, make sure you understand how to interpret the exposure histograms on your camera. This is the best way of checking that you've got the exposure as intended.

[Nigel_Atherton]

I've been to Las Vegas many times and i can assure you that you'll be wanting to take more pictures of the strip at night than in the daytime.

For that reason I would consider a lightweight tripod essential, and some form of remote release desirable (there's dozens of inexpensive third party remotes on Amazon if you can't afford a Canon one.)

For the daytime shots of the strip I'd say the main thing to watch out for is the bright sky affecting your exposures. You may have to dial in plus a half to one stop of compensation. If you can take a polariser it will boost your colour saturation and reduce reflections.

At night, I find the camera's meter usually copes well with the exposure, even when i've been using compacts hand held (leaning against a tree perhaps) but of course you'll get better results with a DSLR on a tripod with a long exposure and smallish aperture. A lot of the neon tends to flash or build up in stages so with a short exposure you'll only capture part of the picture or some of the words. A longer exposure will enable you to record the whole thing lit up.

Make sure you head up to photograph the Bellagio fountains at night - probably the most beautiful thing in Vegas. Fremont Street is also photogenic, with its famous neon cowboy and iconic casinos.

As for photographing inside the casinos, I've done this at Caesars, the MGM and a couple of others and not had any trouble, but I have followed a few self imposed rules:
• Shoot hand held, ISO 1600, no flash
• Stick to general wide views of the casino floor.
• Don't focus on individuals on the tables or slots unless they're with your group.
• No long tele lenses.
• Don't linger or spend too long - aim to take good snaps as a record, rather than works of art. If you look like you're trying to shoot their next brochure you might get stopped.

It could be that you can get away with more than that, I'm just saying I had no trouble when I followed those rules.

I've got a small section of vegas shots here which were shot on compacts that I was testing at the time.

My colleague Paul took some nice shots back in march on a D700, including the aforementioned Bellagio fountains. They're here.