Vegas 23-7

I saw a teeshirt in Vegas that said “Las Vegas 23-7 (everyone needs an hour of sleep)” Now, I’m not going to kid myself, I probably slept a lot more than people went to Vegas to party hard, but I still only averaged maybe 4 hours each night and felt that most days I was functioning at about 40%. I was walking to class one day, checking the schedule and I turned to a man walking in the same direction and said, “It is Monday, right?” and he said “I have no idea”. A friend pointed out that the casinos want it to feel timeless inside. The hotel ceiling are high and have a blue sky painted on them. The lighting is the same all day and all night and the stores are always open. It is the other city that never sleeps.


As fas as the whole “Vegas” thing goes, it didn’t carry much appeal for me. From the sky, Vegas looks like a play city (which it is), a Disney Land for adults. Instead of the normal city white-amber glow, Vegas glows purple and pink and blues and greens. I figured I would at least throw a penny into a slot machine, but the casinos were so depressing, I ended up walking through barely paying attention to them.
There's a Vegas saying "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas". Sherry and I agreed that that is only applicable when there's not a photography conference taking place, in which case everything is recorded and displayed.



The conference bombarded me with ideas, many appealing to my mind and whatever small “business-sense” I have, and some appealed to my heart. There was one speaker who said that he had 11 employees, cranked out tons of weddings and a had never been more miserable in his life. Then late one night in his studio, he had the revelation that his name was on t he sign out front, so he decided to figure out what it was that he really wanted to be doing. This included the recent release of a book name “Souls: Beneath and Beyond Autism” which was written by a mother who has an autistic child & he photographed autistic children, many which documented the close family relationships.






The conference as a whole was very inspiring. I was surrounded by a lot of intelligent photographers who were passionate about what they did. It was like your senior year of college when you’re surrounded by others in your major who are beginning to master certain aspects of the trade (whatever it may be) and would stay up all night bouncing ideas off of each other and planning to go out and pursue all of them the next day, and some of you did, and others were working unrelated menial retail jobs that summer working their way up to management and depression, and wait, that all went sour. I was hoping it would go somewhere great, but with all of these ideas, how do you find the road?

I realized while I was wondering around taking candids of the people I was meeting and observing, that I really enjoy what one photographer called “livestyle” photography (which is also what Nikon calls their “budget” L series point & shoot digital cameras). Marcus Bell called it PJ style (photojournalistic). There’s a reason why in High School Sonya and I would go to Time Square & the Jersey Shore and spend hours just watching people.

I want the freedom, I suppose I have the freedom to just observe and record, without correcting someone if their hand is doing what they call” the claw”, and shoot a portrait without making sure there’s an upside down triangle of light on the far cheek- that’s where it all started, isn’t it?


Sherry and I received some attention from a female security officer for posing on the fountain. She said we need authorization.






Sherry and I went to see the sunrise one morning- very cold, very early- going on 3 hours of sleep, but doesn’t she look beautiful???



























A woman named Dorcas (Sherry's friend's Mother) let us stay in an RV in her driveway in Boulder City, which is about 20 minutes south of Las Vegas. She woke us up each morning, and had breakfast food out on the counter. She packed us snacks for the day, and her daughter-in-law let us borrow her car. We were very thankful for her generosity.