How could I NOT use the most cliched song for this? ;)
I figured it would be a good idea to blog about WPPI 2009 in Las Vegas before I run off to Photoshop World in Boston next week!
This is a longer entry, so there are more after the cut!
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I really wanted to do a photo shoot when I went to Las Vegas, so I was thrilled to find out Erin would be there while I was, along with one of her sisters, Krista, and her mom, Verna. I photographed Erin’s wedding to Jonathan last summer with Litwin Photography, and will be shooting her sister Bethany’s wedding this upcoming summer (my last Litwin booking), so I’ve come to know the family quite well!
Verna didn’t want to be in the photos, but Krista was easy to talk into doing a few with her sister. In my limited location scouting time, I picked out the Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace as our location, and was really glad I did! In under an hour we shot outside AND on all three levels of that part of the mall, so we got tons of awesome shots.
Ideally, I would have kicked all the other people out of the area and gotten some cool photos on the spiral escalators, but well… maybe one day when I’m famous and have that sort of pull ;)
I was also really disappointed that no one else tried to jump into our photos like when Sarah and I did our shoot! I guess this time, we shot too early in the evening for passerbys to be drunk!
Thanks, girls, for being my models!
I managed to find a bit of time in between all my dance practices to go through a few of my photos from Las Vegas in February, and the easiest to start with was Alan Thompson Jr.
(I used one of his recordings for the music on the slideshow.)
Alan used to play piano at Disneyland; hopefully if you visited the park during the three years he worked there, you had a chance to hear him on Main Street, because he was (in my opinion, at least) the best piano player they ever had! He was always able to attract a huge crowd with his playing, and even though he doesn’t work there, he is still legendary… guests are always asking the current piano players if he still plays there!
It’s been over a year since I heard him play in person (FAR too long), but I at least was able to visit with him on my trip. He made two day trips from California to Las Vegas, a nice little bookend to the WPPI convention!
He’s one of those people who doesn’t like having his photo taken, so I ended up with a lot of silly poses that “better not end up on the internet” (I guess they’re just for my own photo album), so I later on got stealthy and tried shooting him when he wasn’t paying attention. Am I a bad person for coercing people against their will into photoshoots? ;)
If you want to check out his mad playing skills, just search for “Alan Thompson piano” on YouTube! My favorite is Grim Grinning Ghosts; I taped that back when I hardly knew the guy. I’m just sorry it was taped from my lousy point and shoot that I still want to drive over… but it got the job done.
WPPI 2009 is so very soon. I can’t believe I am going to Vegas in one week already. Time really flies, and I don’t feel ready at all!
Because I’m getting really buzzed about the Convention and Tradeshow, I thought I’d re-post the blog I made about WPPI 2008 (for some reason I only put it on the Litwin Photography blog and not my own).
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In March Sarah and I flew down to Vegas for our first ever WPPI (Wedding and Portrait Photographers International) Convention and Tradeshow, leaving the Litwins back in Lethbridge to look after Jaxen.
We arrived a few days early and had the weekend to play around, but I was eagerly awaiting the tradeshow so I could pick up my new 40D (among other goodies).
At the opening reception we got a feel of how big the convention really was – over 20,000 photographers were in attendance!
Jesh de Rox in the bottom left corner… I suspected it was him but hadn’t actually seen him before, so I played shy :P
The Young Guns Show was one of my favorite parts of the convention, featuring some awesome photographers all under 30. I was excited that Mike Larson came ready to do a demo. Last summer we saw this video of Mike’s infamous camera toss, and I was pretty stoked to see it in real life!
(Here’s a link to the video of him in action)
You can see how daring (or terrifying!) it is even from where we were sitting in the back. (That object at the top of the photo is the camera, if you couldn’t tell.)
The Tradeshow took up a ton of time, and I STILL could have spent an extra day there!
(photo by Sarah)
Here is Sarah standing on the new Olympus camera. I tried to talk her into Canon, but to no avail.
At the tradeshow, I ran into familiar faces: Mark from de Jourdan’s with his wife Kristina! I never had time to arrange a meetup with them before leaving, so it was quite miraculous to run into them among the thousands of photographers who were there.
Sarah and I both saw some amazing speakers, but my favorite times were when we went out to the strip to try my new camera. We quickly learnt that when you have a camera and a model in Vegas at night, you get a lot of people who think they should be in your photos! Sarah was usually the model, but I took a few turns in front of the camera and even Sarah couldn’t help but admit Canon was great.
We barely slept while we were there but we had a great time, and I’m excited to go back again next year!
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Here are a few more pictures that weren’t in the original entry after the cut…
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