The Las Vegas Strip

On my journey back from New Mexico to the west coast after Thanksgiving, one of my layovers was Las Vegas. We landed not long before sunset and I knew that I had a just over a half hour or so before my next flight took off. After factoring in a bit of slush time for taxiing and such, I excitedly realized that I could have a chance at making a nice photograph right at, or maybe just after sunset when my next flight took off. The only thing that I really needed was a bit of luck in which runway we would take off from.

As we were taxiing into the gate, I saw a flight take off to the north from the runway parallel to the strip. This was very promising as my seat assignment for the next leg was on the left hand side of the aircraft. If we did indeed use the same runway, I’d have a prime seat. When I boarded my San Francisco-bound flight, I made sure that my camera was easily accessible under the seat in front of me. I even left the zippers partially open to facilitate quick access. Everything was looking good and I didn’t want to waste time fumbling around.

I don’t know McCarran well enough to recognize the taxiways, but as we made the turn onto the runway, I was able to see that we were turning onto 1L and the strip came into view. As the pilot revved the engines, I grabbed my camera from my backpack, set the ISO and a few other things, shot off a test shot (shown below) to check exposure, and then rattled off twenty-five shots as we lifted off and turned to west right over the strip.

As I was clicking away, the people that were sitting next to me asked, “Are you a photographer?” I looked over and nodded with a big smile on my face, then went right back to work. All told, I was able to work for just over a minute before the strip receded behind us.

That one minute was worth the entire day’s worth of sitting on three different airplanes going from Albuquerque to Denver to Las Vegas and finally San Francisco.