The Fountains at the Bellagio

As most of you know, I spent last week in Las Vegas.  I did pretty well playing in the poker tournaments, although not quite well enough to bring home a profit.  I had a good time tho, and really enjoyed hanging out in this exciting, lively part of the world.  When I wasn't playing poker or eating delicious buffets, I was carrying around my camera and tripod and taking some photos.  Unfortunately, as I mentioned yesterday, I had a hard time getting creative in this land of streetlights, power lines, and advertisements.  Still, I did my best to bring home some nice shots, even if many of them are the standard views you see from Las Vegas.



The Bellagio Fountains were a natural starting point for me.  The Bellagio is right across the street from both Caesar's Palace, where I was playing poker, and Bally's, where I was staying.  So I had to walk right past it in the evenings on my way back to the hotel from the tournaments, and of course it was very handy when I was leaving the hotel after gathering my camera.  Plus, of course, they really are beautiful.



The great thing about these fountains is that they run four times an hour, and about five minutes at a time.  So I had plenty of opportunity to get a lot of shots and try different setting combinations to get the right effects.  I really did get a lot of pretty shots of these fountains, and it was hard to narrow them down to just these five or six... I have another 20 or 30 I'd like to share, but they'll never see the light of day.  I did upload a few extra to Flickr, tho, so you may be able to see them there.



Although they played a lot of different music for the fountains, all I ever can think of is Celine Dion and "My Heart Will Go On"... the song I heard when I first saw the fountains back in 2001.  The music from this trip was a lot better, and the fountains really are amazing with their blasts of water, but my mind only seems to bring up that stupid song.

They play the Star Spangled Banner at midnight when they shut down the fountains for the day, which I found to be nice.  Like the old days, when the TV used to go off the air and they'd play the national anthem then, too.  Unfortunately, I didn't get to see if the lake displayed a test pattern.



I hope you've enjoyed.  Vegas doesn't put on the level of free shows that they did in the heyday, but that's OK.  I am happy to see what they do still have.  I didn't get a chance to shoot the Sirens at TI, because they are very very crowded, but next up is a series of shots of the volcano at the Mirage.