Just Back from Vegas

Spent most of the week in Sin City's brutal heat. (Hence, the lack of updating.) Headed up Vegas way to shoot some pretty girls for a regular client. I shot in and around a location house, in a small studio, and outside in the freakin' heat!

One place my client wanted to shoot was at the famous "Welcome to Las Vegas" sign. The sign is on the strip a mile or so East of all the big hotels out near the airport. We went there late in the afternoon with the sun low in the sky and the temperatures still in the one-hundreds. It wasn't yet Golden Hour and, although we had intended to stay there and shoot until the magic light arrived, the looky-loos drove us off.

In retrospect, it was kind of funny. I started photographing the girls using a reflector and a speedlite for fill when, seemingly out of nowhere, two limos, a tour bus filled with many people, and a fair number of carloads of tourists stopped in traffic and drove up over the curb and onto the 20' to 30' center divider the Welcome to Vegas sign sits on in the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard. While I continued shooting the three, scantily-clad, pretty girls in front of the sign, a bunch of people, mostly guys, exited the parked vehicles and began crowding around the models. Moments later, a traffic jam formed in both directions around us and my thoughts were less on photography and more focused on the likelihood of LVPD squad cars joining the growing number of vehicles that encircled us. But I'm a professional. So, being a pro (or possibly an idiot) I ignored the growing crowd (moving closer and closer to the models and me) and kept shooting. Interestingly, the crowd seemed to understand my camera's field of view and they mostly remained out of the shots.

Soon, the sounds of hoots, hollers, and cat-calls filled the hot, late-afternoon, Vegas air. My client was becoming agitated. He started running around trying (in vain) to prevent onlookers from snapping photos of the girls. "Dude!" I shouted out at him. "They have as much right to do this as we do." But he's one of those guys who is very possessive about his models--probably more so when spectators are taking pictures of them even though we were in a public area--and he continued trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to bully people into refraining from shooting "his" girls.

The models, on the other hand, were ecstatic about being the subject of such attention and they began posing more for the crowd than for me. In short, things were getting out of hand. Way out of hand! It was quickly becoming a mini Girls Gone Wild episode... in broad daylight and in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip! I know they call it Sin City but there are certain sins they don't tolerate well in Vegas, brief glimpses of public nudity being one of them.

Anyway, between my client, who was becoming more and more aggressive and nasty with the onlookers, angrily shouting at those of them with point-n-shoots to quit snapping pics of the girls, and the models getting bolder and bolder with their teasing/flashing/provocative poses, I thought it best--before a riot broke out--to announce I had captured everything I needed, to forget about waiting for the golden light (which was still thirty or more minutes away) and to get the hell out of there! I packed up my stuff and we quickly herded the models back to our cars and made a hasty exit back to my client's offices.

In all, it wasn't much of a fun trip. I worked a lot of hours and didn't once step foot in a casino or a decent Vegas restaurant or buffet. Oh well. It's probably just as well. With the summer sucking (work-wise) as bad as it did I really didn't have any spare cash to be losing to a casino. I can also stand to miss a meal or two... or three.

The pretty girl at the top is MacKenzee from the morning before I left for Las Vegas. Kind of artsy-ish for me. Maybe not. I suppose that's more for others to decide. Besides, the model wasn't striking an artsy pose when I snapped it. She was simply stretching her back a bit. I added the B&W processing just so it looks like I might be more artistically-cultured than I probably am.