Vegas

This blog is going to be a little bit different, the pictures within are not part of any project that I have been working on for months or anything like that. They are simply some pictures I took over the weekend. I went to Vegas to visit my family, and of course I did a few things outside of that. Not to worry, I am not sharing any photos of my family.

These first few pics you may already be familiar with. The neon museum of Vegas, also known as the Bone Yard. Its the place all good Las Vegas signs go to rest. The museum is pretty amazing. Right now it is halfway between being a museum and a yard filled with old signs. It is a work in progress. I highly recommend taking the tour. They are fifteen bucks a person and you need to book it a couple of weeks ahead of time. They may be able to squeeze in a couple of people on the day of, but it's not very good odds. The tour takes about an hour and you can wander a bit as long as you are within eye site of the tour guide. You will learn a lot of Vegas history and of course the history of the Bone Yard and the signs themselves.

click the link for more pics and rambling.

Boozy Floozy

Tonight I am going to share, or possibly re-share (depending on how far back in my blog you have gone) a few images from my series "Boozy Floozy". As you may or may not know, Boozy Floozy is a series I shot documenting the Boozy Floozy Burlesque Troupe of Orange County. I followed them around for a year, shooting just about every show they did, backstage and on. Shooting these girls was an incredible privilege. They are amazing, and I hope that you can appreciate them from just the photographs!

I suppose this falls into the realm of cliche girls pictures but I can't help myself with it. I completely expect this type of image from this series, and this one completely fulfills my wishes for it to exist within the series.

Simone Danalustrous's fan dance. When I think of iconic images of a Vegas showgirl, this is one of the images that comes up. The light was perfect on her, and you can barely tell the file is an underexposed 3200 ISO shot (honestly, all of these are). I am a huge sucker for large amounts of negative space. Throughout the series, I use shots like this as the "candy". The images that you really just can't help but want to look at.

The Balloon Pop. She starts out with lots of balloons, ends up with none. What is under the balloons? Please. You know what's under the balloons. Bella would fill the balloons with glitter so that with every pop she would shimmer. With this photograph I got the main light perfectly back lighting the glitter as one of her balloons bursts. This was a shot that I overlooked at first, but I found myself coming back to recently. Every night that I shot this dance, I would try to get the moment the balloon popped. This was a far better image than I was hoping for.

Hands are amazing, they tell can tell us everything.I love her chipped fake nails and bandaged finger. Her hands don't look like the delicate female hands that we would like to imagine.

Just in case you are wondering. I am in the process of self publishing this series as a book. I am going to take a huge risk and go out and say that I am aiming for May for it to be finished. Crap. Now I really have to finish it by then!

What do talk about today?! I don't know. Hmmm.

I know! Lets post a picture or two!

It amazes me how discreet you can be with a professional body and lens mounted onto an equally massive tripod. Ok, so I was not discreet, just ignored. Fine with me. Photographing this project, I would walk up and down each side the street moving from one building to the next. I do not photograph every building, but I photograph most of them. This kid knew I was coming, and still just pretended I didn't exist.

The civic center in downtown Santa Ana is a Mecca to Orange County homeless. Any day that you are down there you will find the landscape dotted with trash bags, sleeping bags, a tent or two, and the homeless that they belong to. I didn't want to directly photograph the clusters of homeless people, but I still wanted them to be a part of this project. As a society we try to ignore them, but they are always around, and there is always signs.

The children in the background is jut the icing on the cake. Their mother was trying to take a picture of them with the fighter jet on a cell phone. I offered to take a picture of them with my camera and I would send it to her. I switched to a longer lens for the kids, and I went back to my wide angle for my shot. This project is thick with symbolism, and this image is no different.

I was walking back to my truck late in the afternoon after spending the last few hours photographing the Henniger Park neighborhood. I passed a school bus that was parking along the street, the bus was filled with what looked like the Santa Ana High school baseball team. I set up just passed the bus facing a fence with their home field in the background. I was hoping to get a few shots of the team passing by. One at a time, they slipped through this hole in the fence to get back to their school. One of the kids asked what I was photographing for. I answered that I was photographing a documentary about Santa Ana. The kid yelled back as he was walking "Ahh so you can see how ghetto it is here!". A second kid chimed in "Yeah don't come here!". Half truths and sarcasm.