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City Center, Las Vegas, Nevada.

The tram passing through City Center at sunset.  This view shows City Center pretty well except the Aria blocks the Vdara.

Scion-FR-S seen during a commercial shot, Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada.

I was in Valley of Fire State Park yesterday shooting a moving 3D time-lapse on a 6 foot ramp when my unique setup caught the attention of a film crew working on a car commercial.  I was happy to answer their questions since I had my own questions about their production.  I asked if I could grab a few photos of the cars during the filming and they said go ahead – so this is a scene that you may soon see on TV, except in a horizontal format.

This 2 seat sports car will be released this week I understand – it is a joint venture between Toyota and Subaru.  Subaru will market it as the BRZ, while Toyota  will sell it under their Scion brand and will call it the FR-S.  It will sell for around $25,000.

I often think I may have the best possible job out there – but after talking to the professional drivers who were able to race up and down the curvy roads through the park that were closed off by Highway Patrol – now I’m not so sure.  🙂

Update:  It will be formally introduced tomorrow (Sunday) at the Long Beach Grand Prix as the marshal car.

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.