Fremont Street Experience

One of the most visited sites in Las Vegas is the Fremont Street Experience in downtown Las Vegas….or old Las Vegas.  I do remember what it was like to drive down Fremont Street, way back when I was a visitor here myself.  The Fremont Street Experience was built as a way to attract more tourists to the downtown area, to bring business back to the ‘old school’ casinos such as Binions and The Plaza.  Essentially, it did just that.  It is an interesting and unique spot in Las Vegas.  Lots of photo ops, lots of unique characters…

In continuing with the Self Park series, this shot was actually taken last summer – during the Summer of ‘69 celebration series.  Both of the annual Kelby Photo Walks were at Fremont Street.  I think for the next one I want to take it out to the Strip….I digress.

Whenever we go down to Fremont Street, we park in the main parking garage that is not part of one of the casinos – it is at the tail end of the experience, right above Hennesseys.  I always thought it had a nice view from the parking garage, so I did finally make it down there to get a few shots.  This is an HDR of five images, taken at f/25, tone mapped in Photomatix Pro and I made a few other adjustments with white balance in Lightroom.  I have played with this with many different white balance settings – from the absolutely garish to the hardly there and this is the one I like best (today anyway).  That is the beauty of expressing your self through imagery….you can make it whatever you want.  There is still a lot of discussion out there in the photographic world on the right way to do HDR – I agree with those that are like minded with me – whatever level of tone mapping you do and your end result is up to how you want it to be.  There is not hard fast written rule on how HDR should look, it is simply another way of translating.