Dust lights up the rotors of a CH-47 Chinook helicopter as the 3rd Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment load for an air assault mission in Ghazni province, Afghanistan, on May 23, 2012. The photo is by Sergeant Mike MacLeod, U.S. Army. (Double click to see the whole photo.)
I am not a Las Vegas guy, it seems both very expensive and more like an adult Disneyland than a Sin City. Even more than Disneyland, it seems like a giant version of the cruse ship written about by David Foster Wallaace in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. It is an entire city of distractions. I can safely state that after four hours of walking the Strip from one end to the other without even getting a drink (camera in hand and in full voyeur mode). I don’t mean to say that there isn’t real Sin – when I got back to my hotel at about 10:30, there was a old, gentlemanly looking, Chinese, guy checking in with a staggeringly good looking, improbably tall, black woman barely contained by a very short dress – but that somehow, the Sin doesn’t seem real, somehow it seems passionless.
That is not to infer that everybody is there for the Sin, most people are in Vegas for the shopping, and the dining, and the shows, and the gambling. And Vegas bends over backwards to make all that easy. There are elevated walkways that cross the streets and deposit the walker directly into buildings; the Strip is designed to be walked, it is as walker friendly as any place I have ever been. In the end, Vegas turned out to be a great place to take a walk.
The desert does lots of things well, in my opinion, but civilization is not one of them. Almost any built up area in the desert looks seedy and Las Vegas is not an exception. Except for the Vegas Strip: there the neon lights work just perfectly. The neon sparkles in the clear air and everything seems alive and crisp and clean.
My plan had been to park the truck at one end of the strip, walk down it and back with my tele-zoom, and then repeat with a wide angle lens. It was further down and back as well as a lot more interesting than I expected and Ed had said that he expected to put a wrap on his frolicking early, so I only made one pass using tele. So most of what I have are detail type shots with almost no street views.
As an aside, one thing that surprised me was that I saw several Muslim women in Hijabs. More Hijabs than I saw at Edwin’s graduation in Freemont which has a large Muslim population. End aside. I also saw more than several people dressed in costumes like the Hello Kitty woman below. I think that you could have your picture taken with them for a small fee – that is if you ever wanted to have your picture taken with Hello Kitty, or Spiderman, or a couple of characters that I didn’t recognize – and the costumes themselves seemed too professional and elaborate to be home made or spontaneous. (Maybe the rent them from central casting – I suspect that the women dressed as showgirls fall into that category.)
Of course there is gambling everywhere but gambling is far from the entire show. There are rollercoaster rides,
and lots of themed dining, events, shows,
lots and lots of shopping (the real American pastime),
and lots of sex in all kinds of flavors (I wonder if the HOT BABES direct to you are delivered in the truck).
Meanwhile, back at Ed Dieden and my trip to Las Vegas for Ed’s Vietnam Marine unit’s reunion, we were camped in Mojave National Preserve. We spent a second night at a campsite marked by a preexisting fire ring and some nice stone chairs. I am not a fan of preexisting camp sites, the heavy use usually results in a dirtier site and the food scraps attracts rodents – which, in my imagination, at least, attracts snakes (not that I have ever seen a snake at a campsite) – but this was a nice site among exfoliating granite boulders. We got up, skipped breakfast – no stove – and after a short drive down a dirt road, breakfast at the Mad Greek’s in Baker, and a long drive down a paved road, we got to Vegas.
Once we were there, after showering and shaving, Ed went to the Hospitality Room for his Marine reunion and I was free to roam around Las Vegas searching for the Magic.
I still had my no prime lens problem, so I planned to wander around with a 70~200 tele-zoom for some details and then go back to the truck and switch to a 17~40 wide-angle-zoom and shoot some street scenes. It didn’t work out that way,