With no mirrors, no clocks, and no obvious way out of most Vegas casinos, you could be forgiven for forgetting where on earth you are whilst vacationing in Sin City. However, French-American photographer Vincent LaForet does not suffer from such problems: He has captured this city — a burgeoning urban anomaly in the Nevada desert — in all its idiosyncratic glory, shooting from a helicopter at 9,000 feet up.
LaForet’s vision of the city looks like a neon-fueled architectural model: the miniature effect is created by the photographer’s tilt-shift lens, using selective focus to highlight certain details within the illuminated landscape. Very little post-production is required, with LaForet estimating he spend “30 to 60 seconds max” to color-correct each photograph in Adobe’s Lightroom application.
The results are surreal — the polychromatic sea of glistening lights is reminiscent of a futuristic computer chip, or the suburbs of a mega-metropolis from Steven Lisberger’s sci-fi epic Tron. Interestingly, the most beautiful images might actually be those that show a patchwork of streetlights and the subtle glow of houses far from the Strip — showing there is more to life in Vegas than that rich vein of casinos, restaurants, and five-star resorts.
With his striking set of images, LaForet is a rare species of Vegas tourist — he’s managed to leave the city with more than when he arrived…
Yours elevated,
The Angry Architect
Images via Design Boom