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Zip-line above Boulder City, Nevada.

This is the beginning of a series of zip-lines that end up at the bottom of the mountain.  The end of this zip is on the distant ridge – looks fun!

If you look close you can see a series of trails heading down this hill side.  These are part of a series of down hill mountain biking trails known as the Bootleg Canyon Trails.  On certain days of the week there is a shuttle that hauls riders back to the top.  Add Lake Mead and the Colorado River, and I gotta say, there are a lot of recreation opportunities in this area.

I originally drove / hiked to the top of this mountain thinking it would offer a nice view of the Las Vegas Strip, but it was too far away.  It did provide nice views of the town, lake and this zip-line!

Arch, Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Nevada.

When you see an arch in red rock sandstone you might be thinking we took a detour to Moab, Utah and Arches National Park, but you would be wrong.  This was in Lake Mead NNRA.

I think there are a lot of undiscovered gems in the seldom visited area.  First, the North Shore Road near Lake Mead receives very little traffic.  But by turning off that road onto a 4×4 road and the amount of traffic drops to just a handful per day.  Then, by pulling over at an almost random location and hiking pretty much assures us of being the only humans for miles.  I look forward to spending more time poking around in this area.

Woody Harrelson

I have been in Vegas the last couple of days – I have a film permit to shoot video and 3D video.  Well yesterday we ran across a major film production, filming the movie Now You See Me.  It stars a lot of famous people and according to some reports will be one of the most anticipated movies of 2013.

Watching the production was fascinating – a very slow moving, carefully planned but well conceived creative process.  Nothing is by accident – a casual cocktail waitress briefly passing in front of the actors for example is discussed, modified and practiced before actually filming a number of takes.  Every little detail is scrutinized down to the placement of lights – guys were crawling on the floor at one point identifying distracting light reflections off the shiny floor.   The production had taken over a large portion of the Aria Hotel and Casino.

One of the highlights was seeing Woody Harrelson.   I have enjoyed his acting going back to the days of Cheers – but that isn’t why it was a highlight.  What I thought was awesome was how he took the time to  greet many of the extras on the set – there were around a hundred!  Then he went around and shook hands with the young production assistants who were basically standing off in the distance doing crowd control – class act!

Hoover Dam at sunset, Lake Mead NRA, Nevada / Arizona.

This is from the dramatic new by-pass bridge that routes traffic around the dam.   I captured some images from this bridge last year right after it opened, but they were taken during the day – I like the sunset / evening photos from this trip much better.

Janine getting ready to enter the Lovell Wash Narrows, Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Nevada.

I found this location after checking out some of the more colorful areas of this region on Google Earth.  This was a cool slot canyon!  I included Janine in both of these images to help show the scale of the place, although I have versions of both images without her.

Janine inside the Lovell Wash Narrows, Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Nevada.

Lake Mead, Lake Mead Recreation Area, Nevada.

Sunset on Lake Mead.  This lake has sure dropped a lot over the last decade.  As you can see we have moved to Southern Nevada and are photographing the areas around Lake Mead.

This was captured on a very windy night.  To get enough depth of field to put the entire scene in focus I would have needed an aperture of around f/16 – but that would have lead to a very slow shutter speed and the flowers would have been nothing but a blur in the heavy wind.

So this is actually two exposures – One at f/4 and 1/60th of a second in which I focused just on the flowers.  This became the foreground portion of the images.  The second at f/14 and 1/5th of a second with focus further back.  This became the background. The two images were then combined in Photoshop.

Both exposures were done at ISO 400 and had the same exposure value in that they had the same level of brightness, but this way I could have the flowers fairly sharp and the background.