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Monday, October 10, 2011

The Marina Bay Sands





The Story:

Hello and welcome to the third installment of my posts on the Marina Bay Sands Integrated resort. My first one was a very typical blue hour shot that I made whilst waiting for nightfall during one of the National Day Parade rehearsal fireworks. The next was from this past weekend where I shared a seemingly surreal shot of the helix bridge leading into the Marina Bay Sands casino. While the shot did turn out pretty good, I have my own ideas on how to tweak it both compositionally and otherwise. So stay tuned to this space for more updates.

This time, I present to you a toned down version of the same scene - The Helix bridge leading to the Sands Integrated resort at my favorite time of the day to shoot. There is not a lot going on this shot and it is very pleasing to the eye, as opposed to the other one wherein there were a lot of stuff competing for the viewers attention. At least, I think so.

The Scene:


Marina Bay Sands is an integrated resort (Conservative talk for Casino) fronting Marina Bay in Singapore. Developed by Las Vegas Sands, it is billed as the world's most expensive standalone casino property at S$8 billion, including cost of the prime land. This place is HUGE. With the casino complete, the resort features a 2,561-room hotel, a 1,300,000-square-foot (120,000 m2) convention-exhibition centre, the 800,000-square-foot (74,000 m2) The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands mall, an iconic ArtScience museum, two large theatres, seven "celebrity chef" restaurants, two floating Crystal Pavilions, an ice skating rink, and the world's largest atrium casino with 500 tables and 1,600 slot machines. The three towers are 55 stories (storeys?) each. The complex is topped by a 340m-long SkyPark with a capacity of 3,900 people and a 150m infinity swimming pool, set on top of the world's largest public cantilevered platform, which overhangs the north tower by 67m. The 20-hectare resort was designed by Moshe Safdie Architects.

I must admit that in my 2 trips to the Sands so far, I have only covered about 1/4th of what is mentioned above. One of these days, I will definitely go back again and get some decent shots from the interiors.

The ArtScience Museum is next to the three blocks and has the shape of a lotus. Its roof is retractable, providing a waterfall through the roof of collected rainwater when closed in the day and with laser shows when opened at night. I deliberately gave that a miss since that structure was at least about 2 stops brighter than anything else in the scene. Also, from where I was at, I could see about 3 of the "petals" of the lotus. I'm going to assume that the structure is beautiful from the inside and not pass any quick judgments yet, but let us just say that I'm not convinced by the beauty of that structure from what I have seen from the outside.

The Shot:


f/11 | ISO 100 | 11 mm on the Canon 10-22 | 30 sec

Credits: 
Some text from Wikipedia

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