Tag Archive for: exterior

One Stunning Office Building in Summerlin

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A six-story office building at twilight with beige and grey exterior, three glass balconies, with palm trees and desert lanscaping in the foreground with rich blue skies and the Las Vegas Strip in the background.

4:30AM must qualify as one of the most horrible and unpopular hours of the day. Great things don’t happen at 4:30. Even for a town like Las Vegas, by 4:30 most of the fun has already happened, and for anyone else awake at that hour, it either means you have a new baby or you have a cruel employer. But on occasion, a very early hour lends itself to some great photos.

VCC, the contractor tasked with building the Two Summerlin office building in Downtown Summerlin, just across from Red Rock Casino, needed some great portfolio images of the brand-new beautiful  building just completed. Since we wanted to shoot the space at a dramatic twilight hour but dusk put the setting sun directly behind the building creating less-than-flattering light. Consequently, we opted to shoot at dawn, putting us at the site at the aforementioned unsavory hour.

A six-story office building at twilight with beige and grey exterior, with palm trees and desert lanscaping and the top of a parking structure in the foreground with rich blue skies and mountains the background.

What’s more, shooting the building from the ground simply didn’t do justice to the stunning new edifice. From the adjacent parking garage, one is too close to shoot the full building–even with a wide-angle lens. So we enlisted the help of a scissor lift atop the parking structure to allow us to both move back and move up to capture a beautiful perspective of the new tower.

A six-story office building and adjacent three-story parking structure in daytime with streets and landscaping in the foreground.

Start on the third floor of a parking structure and go up another 20 feet in a scissor lift and some great perspectives result.

An office building elevator lobby with shiny tile floors and walls and a green, orange, black, and purple piece of abstract art hanging alongside a stainless steel elevator door.An office building restroom with beige and white tile floor and wall and a beige synthetic countertop with three basins in the foreground and a stainless steel stall door in the background. And elevator interior with shiny silver walls and a grey glass center panel with the words "Two Summerlin" written in white and white LED lighting atop.We also shot the small, but beautiful elevator lobby, the restrooms and the elevator as well, and we thought the photos are certainly worthy of posting.

An off-centered perspective of a six-story office building at twilight with beige and grey exterior, three glass balconies, with palm trees and desert lanscaping in the foreground with rich blue skies and the Las Vegas Strip in the background.

This final shot is a personal favorite; though the building isn’t centered, nor is the whole structure within the frame, it splits the building and distant Vegas lights nicely and distinctly places the tower in its neon-desert environment.

US Bureau of Reclamation

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Workers hoping to get a job on the massive Boulder Dam (now called Hoover Dam) began setting up squatters camps near the chosen work site in 1930. These camps of prospective dam workers might be called the first citizens of Boulder City–a town assembled specifically to house the administration and workforce of the largest public works project in American history. Boulder City was built in a triangular shape and at the peak was the Bureau of Reclamation Administration Building, overlooking the town on one side and the subsequent lake which would be formed by the Dam’s construction. The Administration Building oversaw the successful completion of the Dam and continued to house those overseeing both the operation of the dam and the management of the resources it provided. For nearly ninety years the Administration Building operated without a major renovation–until in 2018 when the Bureau of Reclamation finally completed a full and long overdue restoration of the historic Administration building at 1200 Park in Boulder City.

Upon completion of the restoration, the US Bureau of Reclamation gave us the fantastic opportunity this summer to photograph the building in its fully-restored grandeur. From its iconic exterior to the bathrooms inside, nearly everything was redone, and nearly everything was photographed. Over two days we shot the carefully reconditioned structure both inside and out and delivered over 100 images of the beautiful new environment in which the employees of the Bureau of Reclamation now work. Below are a few samplings of the images we captured in this great project.

While in the previous exterior photo we enhanced the building with some supplemental lighting, we also included some much more natural images in the end bundle. The dramatic skies at dusk here are no sky replacement and all the light is ambient, giving a fairly perfect idea of what the building looks like on a long August night.

The conference room acts as both a normal meeting space, but can also double as a command center in times of crisis. We wanted to capture this particular space both in daytime, with all its natural light and at night to showcase its abundant and modern lighting.

 

In multiple parts of the building the preexisting materials were kept to echo the building’s historic roots. Here we see some exposed brick kept in a Bureau restroom.

On the tastefully restored patio the unique placement of the Administration can be appreciated as one can peer down upon Lake Mead, the child of the Boulder Dam Project, which delivers water and electricity to Las Vegas and numerous western states.

Variety and Creativity in Commercial Real Estate Photography

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We have the regular opportunity to photography commercial shopping centers which are for sale. When shooting, we don’t have the luxury of a controlled environment, with shoppers, cars, weather, and all the complications of shooting during business hours. Nonetheless, we often have the task of creating professional images in this less-than-professional environment. In addition, we get requests to feature the setting of the shopping center, such as being adjacent to the strip or having views of the valley. At Lake Mead Crossing, the setting included the dramatic desert mountains surrounding the complex. With large, big-box retail buildings, seeing surrounding landscape can be a challenge–after all, the mountains, though large, are 20 miles away. So while we provided strong wide-angle images of the major retailers at the property and its luscious landscaping, we walked backwards and pulled out a longer lens to allow the desert mountains to peek over the buildings and add context to the images. Shooting in both daylight and at the beautiful twilight hour, we were able to provide the agency’s designers a variety of images for their sales materials for the property. Producing a diverse set of clean, beautiful and authentic visuals for our clients is not only one of our biggest goals, it’s creatively challenging, and a lot of fun.

 

 

Capturing the Mood of a Property

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It’s great to be part of the sale of a beautiful home. We work with a lot of great agents that take pride in the work they do–both listing and showing homes for sale. A good agent does a lot to close a sale–from the hard work of marketing, to dealing personalities (not always charismatic ones), to piles of paperwork, and in the end, doing whatever it takes to make something happen. And now with so much of the process of buying and selling properties taking place online (especially viewing properties before you visit them), the agent needs to provide online listings which capture attention and get people in the door. Great photography is the starting point in this process. Having gone from a luxury to a necessity, the photographs you have online are the single biggest draw you have for a property.

Every home has a visual selling point, that a good photographer will try to capture and encapsulate in a single image. Take a look at some recent photos we took of a beautiful home in Green Valley. Using the backyard foliage to frame the foreground in the above photo, we created a scene which emphasized the mood that the lush landscaping gives to the backyard. Paired with crisp, solid images of the well-maintained house, this listing will stand apart from its peers.

Whether you need to make a property look better that it does in person, or whether you need to make sure it shines in photos like it does in real life, professional photography makes all the difference when selling a home.