A Snap Shot of Photography

The Boudoir Divas

This week I ventured to Las Vegas with my wife on very different terms than usual.  Typically I am meeting one or both of my best friends here for a few days of hiking, escape and exploration.  We usually stay in a cheap hotel in old downtown Las Vegas and for the most part eschew the glitzy glamor for a more pedestrian side of the city.  We quest for cheap craps, contact with locals and the discovery of the degenerate side of the city that provides endless colors for blogs.

Trips to Las Vegas with my wife are on very different terms.  They focus on the glitzy side of Las Vegas and don't involve gambling.  They tend to involve a lot of culinary experience far distant from the $3.95 steak dinners and roadside burritos I eat with my friends.  Oh yes, and there is the shopping. Shopping for three men is a quick in and out.  For a woman it is hours of strolling.   I guess each experience has it's own pluses and minus' and should be taken on it's own terms. Mentally I do my best to comprehend this and quietly hope my wife will understand when I return to the West possibly a few months later to meet my guy friends.

Some photo bag designer 'Kelly Moore'

I have never been to a convention before.  I confess I hoped it might be like an old Shriners convention with people in funny hats running around the corridors and an odd assortment of characters waiting to let loose.  In reality it is a broad spectrum of people from around the world that come together in one place for the convention and not for Las Vegas.  They are not gamblers or wild party types.  They are earnestly seeking information and a good deal on equipment to fill out the photographers endlessly expanding repertoire of amazingly expensive do dads that do things I don't understand.  From a distance I am amazed at the organization.  How something like this is executed is beyond me.  Everything is so organized and positioned.  It must literally take a years planning to pull something like this off.  Classrooms, speakers, convention halls and after hours events hosted by major vendors.  The day after the thing closes planning must commence for the subsequent year.

Walking around the convention floor is an experience that is almost cathartic in my search for the America of tomorrow.  There are times when I feel like our nation has lost its ability to create business and entrepreneurship.  The countless booths of people selling their own unique inventions and constructions has proven me wrong.  So many ideas, if we could only manufacture them here America would rise again. It is also refreshing to see people from around the world travel here to find them.   It makes me wish I had the business mind to invent something and sell it with such veracity and dedication.  The WPPI convention has two sides.  One is a conference hall filled with the big stodgy vendors.  Nikon, Sony, Canon and poor Kodak are among the large displays.  There is an air of arrogance that hangs over the place.  These are the big boys and they have the tools that everyone needs at a most basic level.  A second convention hall is filled with the small vendors.  These stalls are tiny and each is trying to figure out the best way to grab your attention for a moment or two.  These are the entrepreneurs and the ones in truth I most admire.

Women flock to the booths selling bags... men to the displays of radio controlled helicopters that allow youth attach a Gopro camera and sore high above buildings and the tree line in an aerial reconnaissance worthy of a military drone over Pakistan.  On the other hand photography creates a strange mergence of the sexes when it comes to the daily tools of the trade.  Both women and men stand gawking over lighting, reflectors, backdrops and every other tool imaginable.  All the while I stand marveling at the whole spectacle and wonder if there are any free things I can snag.  Another moment when my wife was engaged in a discussion with a vendor over printing photos on wood blocks I found my eyes wandering to the amazing bubble butt of a Latina working in an adjacent booth. Every two or three minutes she kept walking to the back of her booth and shoving a piece of candy in her mouth before returning to solicit the next potential client.  In her case it was for some kind of portrait wedding vendor that makes arrangements for people and photographers wanting to stage a wedding in Seville, Spain.

While the vast majority of our Las Vegas time was dedicated toward the pursuit of photography there were a few golden moments.  One was the discovery of the Williams Costume Company.  This place is so authentic they don't even have a website, almost unheard of in this day and age.  Not a a pre-packaged costume can be found in the store filled with racks and racks of hand sewn fantasy escape.  "This is what a costume store should be." I told the deep voiced owner as I searched through her stock imagining I was in Inspector Clouseau meeting with the costume genius Professor Auguste Balls in his Paris costume shop.  The beauty of a shop like Williams Costume Company is that the owner is a not just a sales person, she or he is a wealth of information on living in Las Vegas and the characters and oddity of the existence that life has presented.

Later we were driving around and passed a vintage clothing store named Electric Lemonade.  Located not far from Williams Costume Company in the Arts District, Electric Lemonade is a newcomer and in my view a shining star and hope for the future.  It is a small but well chosen collection of vintage clothing that from now on will be a scheduled stop every time I visit Las Vegas.  The owner is a young and energetic woman who with her sister, moved out to Las Vegas from Brooklyn.  They purchased an old building at the bottom of the Las Vegas real-estate collapse and are sub letting it as well as running their own shop.  Eventually they hope to create a loft upstairs with a terrace that if achieved would provide an amazing view of Las Vegas at night.  Sadly I didn't catch the owners name but for me, it is people like her that are the future of this odd desert town.  She represents the future and has a creative and humanistic eye that finds value in a vastly deeper and more complex side to Las Vegas seldom seen by the strip tourist.  These qualities alone mark her as a very special person in my view.

Five days in Las Vegas can seem short or an eternity.  It depends how you view them.  When I venture west with my friends we spend the days hiking in Red Rock and exploring.  At night we hang out on Fremont street or seek out the most degenerate halls of gamblers in odd corners of the city with the hope of discovering a cheap craps game and a collection of stories to remember the adventure by.  When I travel with my wife the color is different yet the portrait created is unique in its own right.  This time it was a menagerie of trade show and Filipino cuisine accented by shopping and local discovery.  Not so much in the way of partying yet the welcome relief of awaking in the morning with wide eyes and energy as opposed to dry mouth and lungs hurting from second hand smoke.

Emerging from a landscape nearly devoid of life Las Vegas continues to stand out as a place that should not exist but does.  As an island of contrast as diverse as the sea life in a Pacific atoll.  It is filled with people that don't resemble me in the least yet for a moment, I catch a glimpse into their worlds.  From the obscenely rich and the beautiful hard bodies strutting their style to the shivering junkie in a corner being hit with the DTs like a ton of bricks.  Homeless people walk with purpose and destination yet I can only imagine what location they are seeking out.  Scantily clad working girls walk down Maryland Avenue seeking a quick buck while middle class people pursue a middle class life.  All the while my eyes absorb it all and think of how best to translate it into a canvas that consists of nothing more than black letters on a white background.  It is a kind of painting that never ends, it only drops off one canvas to be resumed on another at a different point in time.  Leaving Las Vegas is never a departure, it is simply an interlude before I return again.