Tag Archive for: las vegas

Luxury Real Estate Photography in 2020

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One of the best parts of being an architectural photographer is being able to see so many beautiful spaces. One of the most fun and diverse subjects we shoot is luxury real estate. From high-rise condos, to sprawling desert villas the range of luxurious spaces covers a broad spectrum of lifestyles and personalities: from lavish and indulgent socialites to Vegas cronies to stately suburbanites. It is satisfying to both the eye and the curiosity to be able to peer inside the closed doors of the well-to-do. Have a look at some of the photos we’ve been able to create in the first half of 2020.

Pedestrian Grade Separation Construction Photography

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A “pedestrian grade separation” is a wordy term for a footbridge, a crosswalk, a flyover–which over a street like Las Vegas Boulevard, is a very valuable thing. Combine a street with perpetual gridlock with a sea of sometimes sober sightseers and you concoct a cocktail for catastrophe. So one of the most worthwhile city investments on the Strip for safety and efficiency could be to keep walkers away from rollers.

Building a footbridge over one of the busiest and most famous streets in the world is no small task though. There are considerations for safety, traffic, and a need not to disrupt the business of fun on the strip.

Granite Construction recently commissioned us to capture some progress photos of their project to build an elevated crosswalk from the Park MGM to the Hard Rock Café–over the busy, and functioning, Las Vegas Strip. Since the work crews are not allowed by the city to work on the Strip during midday, we starting shooting around 6:00AM and took advantage of the early morning light (and cooler temperatures.) Our task was to capture the progress of the build, the process of the build (to be used in future proposals), and to secure some shots of the crew themselves. Take a look!

2019 Trade Show Photography

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The start of each year heralds the arrival of a slew of high-profile trade shows in Las Vegas. Kicking off with the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Las Vegas welcomes some of the biggest, most elaborate exhibits money can buy, and since these exhibits have a life span of only 3 or 4 days, documenting the exhibit with professional photography becomes a high priority. From IBS / KBIS to NADA (actually in San Francisco this year) to ISC West, acronyms take over much of our workload from January through March. We invite you to don your virtual lanyard and browse through of our few favorite images from the trade shows we’ve photographed in early 2019.

 

One Stunning Office Building in Summerlin

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A six-story office building at twilight with beige and grey exterior, three glass balconies, with palm trees and desert lanscaping in the foreground with rich blue skies and the Las Vegas Strip in the background.

4:30AM must qualify as one of the most horrible and unpopular hours of the day. Great things don’t happen at 4:30. Even for a town like Las Vegas, by 4:30 most of the fun has already happened, and for anyone else awake at that hour, it either means you have a new baby or you have a cruel employer. But on occasion, a very early hour lends itself to some great photos.

VCC, the contractor tasked with building the Two Summerlin office building in Downtown Summerlin, just across from Red Rock Casino, needed some great portfolio images of the brand-new beautiful  building just completed. Since we wanted to shoot the space at a dramatic twilight hour but dusk put the setting sun directly behind the building creating less-than-flattering light. Consequently, we opted to shoot at dawn, putting us at the site at the aforementioned unsavory hour.

A six-story office building at twilight with beige and grey exterior, with palm trees and desert lanscaping and the top of a parking structure in the foreground with rich blue skies and mountains the background.

What’s more, shooting the building from the ground simply didn’t do justice to the stunning new edifice. From the adjacent parking garage, one is too close to shoot the full building–even with a wide-angle lens. So we enlisted the help of a scissor lift atop the parking structure to allow us to both move back and move up to capture a beautiful perspective of the new tower.

A six-story office building and adjacent three-story parking structure in daytime with streets and landscaping in the foreground.

Start on the third floor of a parking structure and go up another 20 feet in a scissor lift and some great perspectives result.

An office building elevator lobby with shiny tile floors and walls and a green, orange, black, and purple piece of abstract art hanging alongside a stainless steel elevator door.An office building restroom with beige and white tile floor and wall and a beige synthetic countertop with three basins in the foreground and a stainless steel stall door in the background. And elevator interior with shiny silver walls and a grey glass center panel with the words "Two Summerlin" written in white and white LED lighting atop.We also shot the small, but beautiful elevator lobby, the restrooms and the elevator as well, and we thought the photos are certainly worthy of posting.

An off-centered perspective of a six-story office building at twilight with beige and grey exterior, three glass balconies, with palm trees and desert lanscaping in the foreground with rich blue skies and the Las Vegas Strip in the background.

This final shot is a personal favorite; though the building isn’t centered, nor is the whole structure within the frame, it splits the building and distant Vegas lights nicely and distinctly places the tower in its neon-desert environment.

Dunkin Convention 2018

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Partnering with our long-time client, tradeshow exhibit designer/manufacturer/installer Czarnowski, Dunkin Brands’ needed some photography for its international convention in 2018, the first of its kind in eight years. What started with our typical offering (careful, detailed, and crisp images of the exhibits on the trade floor), soon expanded into comprehensive photography of everything taking place at the show. We don’t sell ourselves as event photographers, but our biggest goal is to meet the needs of our clients, whatever they be. Aiming to deliver a fantastic end product and a great working relationship, we worked through the night to make sure images from the previous day were retouched and available to the various teams at Dunkin by morning. From their social media team, to the event production staff (for display on the big screen during general sessions), to various other departments and executives, all the images they needed were delivered on-time to a shared cloud folder each day of the event. Ultimately, we were thrilled that the Dunkin Convention in 2018 which included tradeshow exhibit photography, some portraiture, concert photography, and general event photography went without a hitch, as did the show as a whole thanks to a team of smart, energetic, and positive individuals from Dunkin’. Below are some selections of the 1200+ images we delivered from the event.

A Baskin Robbins store as a trade show exhibit with a pink arch and logo screen left, a white wall with grey printed logo centered, and tables with pink umbrellas screen right and the interior display cases and counters visible.

Kelly Clarkson performs in the MGM Grand Arena at the Dunkin’ 2018 Convention.

A poolside party, one of a couple dozen events we covered during the 2018 Dunkin International Convention.

General Sessions in the MGM Grand Arena were packed with creative entertainment, great lighting and screen visuals, and big announcements complete with confetti canons.

Bahamas Suite at Westgate Las Vegas

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A blue-surfaced pool table in a lavendar-toned hotel room with a dining table and wide city view at dusk in the windows.

I’ve written before about the the opportunities we have to shoot at Westgate Las Vegas. In their continuing saga to remodel and photograph the myriad specialty suites which dot the massive hotel, we’ve recently photographed the Bahamas Suite, and had a lot of fun in the process. The fun didn’t come without its challenges. The evening we shot, the windows were filthy.. and shooting on the 32rd floor eliminates the option of a quick windexing. A little magic in post did the trick: hand carving the borders of those immense windows, we replaced the glare and dirt of the windows with the sparkling view from a neighboring balcony (this really is the view from outside.) Of course, we also added a little light in some dimly lit alcoves, and we’re pretty proud of the result. Below is a single exposure, unprocessed, to give you an idea of what we started out with.

 

A blue-surfaced pool table in a hotel room withamber color temperature, black windows reflecting glare from the room in the background

Below are some more images that we delivered for this guestroom. We hope you like them!

A hotel room with a blue-surfaced pool table in the foreground and a living room with flat-panel TV on silver, patterned wallpaper and a crystal chandelier above.Two grey, pin-cushioned velvet setees in hotel room facing the windows with a twilight sky in the distance.Custom Las Vegas Guest Suite with a Blue Pool table in the foreground, lavender-colored bartools surrounding a bar behind and a wide crystal chandelier above.

2017 Black Hat and Cisco Live Conventions

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Recent technology conventions Cisco Live and Black Hat brought technology companies and their impressive exhibits to Las Vegas in past the few months. Once again, we had the chance to tromp through the convention center at Mandalay Bay and have free reign before the shows opened to capture some of the best exhibits at the shows. From Malwarebytes and their illuminated robot statue to Attivo’s hall of mirrors, there was no shortage of creativity on display.

Below you can take a look at some of our photos of these exhibits with our standard post-production processes (straightening, lens correction, color correction, and exposure correction) as well as some which have had added post-production work done to the photos. Additional editing in these images includes darkening, desaturating, and blurring the background, masking and cleaning up video screens, reduction of noise in solid areas, and spot color corrections such as reducing orange or green color casts from nearby light sources or the convention hall lighting. We hope you like the photos!

 

Variety and Creativity in Commercial Real Estate Photography

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We have the regular opportunity to photography commercial shopping centers which are for sale. When shooting, we don’t have the luxury of a controlled environment, with shoppers, cars, weather, and all the complications of shooting during business hours. Nonetheless, we often have the task of creating professional images in this less-than-professional environment. In addition, we get requests to feature the setting of the shopping center, such as being adjacent to the strip or having views of the valley. At Lake Mead Crossing, the setting included the dramatic desert mountains surrounding the complex. With large, big-box retail buildings, seeing surrounding landscape can be a challenge–after all, the mountains, though large, are 20 miles away. So while we provided strong wide-angle images of the major retailers at the property and its luscious landscaping, we walked backwards and pulled out a longer lens to allow the desert mountains to peek over the buildings and add context to the images. Shooting in both daylight and at the beautiful twilight hour, we were able to provide the agency’s designers a variety of images for their sales materials for the property. Producing a diverse set of clean, beautiful and authentic visuals for our clients is not only one of our biggest goals, it’s creatively challenging, and a lot of fun.

 

 

CON/AGG, ACFAS, and ExhibitorLive! 2017

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An elevated perspective of a Danfoss White Drive trade show exhibit with red carpet, white tables and counters with multiple red vertical displays throughout and a suspended banner with their logo above and a pony wall with a black and blue print of a gear in the foreground. Photo edited so that the outside area is darkened and colorless.

We’ve had the chance to photograph some beautiful exhibits at different conventions and trade shows in Las Vegas during the first quarter of 2017. From construction exhibitors at CON/AGG (CONExpo), to medical device makers at ACFAS, to conventioneers at ExhibitorLive!, we’ve shot a diverse array of trade show booths and we want to share some of the photos we came away with.

To draw attention to the most important features for our clients, we process these images and “turn down the lights” so that all the background distractions are muted, yet the exhibit is still visibly in the convention space. We typically deliver our clients dozens of images, usually taken in a 30-90 minute window. Have a look!

 

Trade show exhibit with an orange and white color scheme, a suspended rectangular banner with four faces above and multiple product displays within and a two-story platform in the background. Photo edited so that the outside area is darkened and colorless.

Czarnowski trade show exhibit with a wood-paneled exterior and low decorative planter as an exterior border with classical art on a wall in the background and edited so that the outside area is darkened and colorless.

A trade show exhibit from an oblique angle with a red wall in the center, rectangular red banner floating above and red carpet with modern white tables, chairs and kiosks edited so that area outside the booth is darkened and colorless.

A centered photo of the Stryker booth at ACFAS 2017 with hanging banner, welcome counter with LCD screen, and four vertical signs all with the Stryker logo--edited so that background is dimmed.

SkinnyFats’ Third Location

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SkinnyFats is taking Las Vegas by storm, offering healthy food options alongside some down and greasy guilty pleasures. With an innovative menu and fun interiors, the restaurant is making food look like an easy business. We were thrilled to be able to shoot some fast-food retail restaurant photography of their newest location in Centennial Hills. Opening locations as quick as possible you need to get some quality photos as quickly as possible and we’re happy to be a partner in getting the word out. With the exterior still under construction, we offer you a look at the very cool interior of the Centennial Hills location of this up-and-coming titan of a food chain.