ZOMBIE GARDEN in LAS VEGAS? US West Trip Part 3 - Viva Las Vegas!

Hello fellow Steemers and anyone else checking out this post, welcome to part 3 of my photoseries of my continuing travels! This time I was in Las Vegas for a convention and to meet my friend from California for a few days. We stayed at the Excalibur hotel and spent a lot of time getting drinks up and down The Strip, riding the roller coaster at the New York New York casino, and doing a lot of people watching - Las Vegas might be the most interesting cross section of domestic, foreign, tourist and local, just an incredibly diverse crowd all coming out to the middle of the desert too see the fountains at the Bellagio or the 1/4th size Eiffel Tower at Paris (or the canals at Venice, one of my favorites!).

Now for some good news and bad news: I do have good footage, great even, of what it's like to walk down The Strip and really be in the heart (well, the south end anyway) of Vegas. The bad news is all that footage is on my brand new Xiaomi 360 camera, and I haven't fully figured out how to upload the footage from the SD card that retains the stitching so you can get the full experience. I'm working on it though, stay tuned!

Now let's get onto the pictures:

This image is a little dark but I didn't have much luck brightening it up because of the sky in the background, but this was the view from our hotel room! We spent many hours over two days lounging in the pool at Excalibur, mainly the large mushroom shaped one.

Both of these have a ton of issues from a purely technical photo perspective, but I think the sky in both is just stunning along with the mountains in the second pic. Both of these shot not 10 minutes apart, shows what difference lighting can make! (Taken using my Sigma EX 10-20mm f/4-5.6 DC HMS)

This and the following two photos are my favorites from getting familiar with my telephoto lens (Canon EFS 55-250 mm f/4-5.6 IS II). These shots are of things over a mile away so I'm actually pretty impressed with the quality. Another beautiful mountain view in the background!

More mountains, and for a sense of distance you can see these buildings on the right side of the first and second picture.

OK last window pic!!
The City of Lights indeed (or is that Paris?) It honestly reminds me a lot of Chicago, the way the lights in the distance have a yellow-orange tint.

The second half of my stay in Vegas was for a few days at an AirBnB to finish up at the convention I was attending. My host Brian put me up in a great pirate themed room with all kinds of maps and pirate flags and I had a great time getting to know him and learning more about the area from a local. Brian was an event photographer in Las Vegas for 30 years and had a slideshow of some of the most amazing photos I've ever seen (including Siegfried and Roy shows, professional aerial shots of The Strip and surrounding desert, and a TON of famous celebrities he captured candidly over the years. Really really inspiring stuff! The best part of staying with Brain, though, was checking out all the cool stuff in his home, and in his yard, including the ZOMBIE GARDEN that I thought was just awesome!!! He also had photos of some of the best zombie themed cosplay I had ever seen. Let's take a look!

Pretty spooky huh? Here's a shot of the whole garden together:

(The bunnies are behind the orange flowers)

Here's a shot of my host Brain and his super friendly dog Sparky!

Thanks Brain for being an awesome host and putting together such a great home and garden.

I hope you enjoyed seeing a different side of Las Vegas! I'll make a follow up post when I can figure out how to upload my 360 footage, and I'm going to try to do more cryptocurrency related writing on this page, so stay tuned for that! Next leg of the trip will be sunny Los Angles, some great shots down in Malibu and a few others. Thanks for reading!

A few bonus shots: