Matt BlazeLas Vegas Strip (day), Paradise, NV, 2023.
A jackpot of pixels at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/53029077258
Flickr
The Las Vegas strip is almost a parody of itself, with ever increasingly garish hotel/casinos elbowing each other for attention. By day, it looks like a hastily abandoned theme park after some apocalyptic disaster.
This is a composite of two (4x3 vertical orientation) captures, each made with the camera shifted up 15mm, and then with individual captures shifted 18mm left and right, respectively. The result is two "side-by-side" vertical images with just enough overlap to allow them to be stitched together into a 5x7 horizontal frame, yielding a total of about 280 megapixels. Because in Vegas, more is more.
The equivalent field of view on a full frame 35mm camera would be roughly that of a 26mm lens.
The 70mm/5.6 Rodenstock Digaron is a terrific lens for making stitched images or for photos requiring extensive use of camera movements. It's sharp almost to the very edges of the (very large) image circle, and has almost no distortion. It's also, happily, the least expensive (as these things go) lens in the Rodenstock high-res digital line.
Note the Trump casino hotel in the background. It is, according to bank filings, 310 stories tall and worth five trillion dollars.
Give or take.
Jan ☕🎼🎹☁️🏋️♂️@mattblaze it's probably a rounding error.
Que@jan @mattblaze according to court testimony it’s actually worth more and is probably 400 floors
Third spruce tree on the left
faraiwe
D C Ross@mattblaze
If you look at the original documents, it is worth "four or five trillion dollars".
So it's $5,000,000,000,000 when taking out loans, but $4 when paying taxes.
Richard W. Woodley ELBOWS UP 🇨🇦🌹🚴♂️📷 🗺️@mattblaze
Yet smartphone makers claim their tiny made of who knows what camears are as good as real cameras
Yet smartphone makers claim their tiny made of who knows what camears are as good as real cameras
cass 
@mattblaze have you seen what they’ve done to accommodate the Grand Prix? Seems wasteful even by Vegas standards.
just here for the chips & dip@mattblaze And somehow, post-COVID, it's even more desperate and weird. With all of the temporary infrastructure for the Formula1 races, it felt like a desert prison.
Mark T. Tomczak@mattblaze The theme park analogy is, I think, very apropos.
My first visit to Vegas, I noted that even though all the casino / hotel complexes are competing, they're all cut from essentially the same template: slot machines / accomodations / commercial shopping / "unique pull," i.e. the thing that casino is known for (be it an indoor amusement park, unique resident floor show, or architectural gimmick).
It's very Disney. You can analogize the setup of each complex to the setup of the various themed areas in Magic Kingdom, or the interplay between the parks themselves and the supporting resort hotels. Strip the veneer and the skeletons match up complex-by-complex.
Tim Richards@mattblaze @PattyHanson True that. Definitely not designed for daytime eyes.
Adrianna Tan@timrichards @mattblaze @PattyHanson You’re supposed to stay in a casino until you don’t know whether it’s day or night (also, check out Raku, a fantastic little Japanese restaurant off the strip that many chefs go to after work)
@skinnylatte @mattblaze @PattyHanson My hotel there didn't have any coffee making facilities in the room, so you'd be forced to go downstairs to get a coffee and hopefully play the slots over breakfast at the same time. Subtle.
Sasha Kotlyar@mattblaze
Having just seen "Postcard from Earth" in the Sphere, coming back out into the street really underscored the post-apocalyptic feel of Vegas.
Having just seen "Postcard from Earth" in the Sphere, coming back out into the street really underscored the post-apocalyptic feel of Vegas.
Norman Wilson@mattblaze Back in the mid-1980s, I attended a DECUS in LVS, arriving westbound on train 35, i.e. first thing in the morning. Decided to walk out to hotel/conf site in Paradise (sic). Decidedly spooky deserted downtown; more normal once I got into intervening residential area.
@mattblaze I believe that was the trip during which I joined a small group on a visit to the Liberace Museum. Quite the monumentette to kitsch.
@oclsc That sounds too Vegas even for Vegas.
@mattblaze Fortunately, it stayed in Vegas, though Bill Griffith spread knowledge of its existence. It was sort of a Zippyesque pilgrimage.