It’s no secret that Las Vegas is a visually stunning city. But sometimes, there’s much more than meets the eye. Here, three of the city’s premier photographers share their unique visions of Las Vegas culture, cuisine and architecture.

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• LENS: Pinhole FILM: 4x5 Fuji/Chrome Provia 100F SHUTTER SPEED: 8 Seconds F-Stop: 257
• LENS: Pinhole FILM: 4x5 Iilford FP4 Plus black & white negative, ISO 125 SHUTTER SPEED: 16 Seconds F-Stop: 257
• LENS: Pinhole FILM: 4x5 Iilford FP4 Plus black & white negative, ISO 125 SHUTTER SPEED: 8 Seconds F-Stop: 257
• LENS: Pinhole FILM: 4x5 Fuji/Chrome Provia 100F SHUTTER SPEED: 30 minutes F-Stop: 257
• LENS: Pinhole FILM: 4x5 Fuji/Chrome Provia 100F SHUTTER SPEED: 1 minute, 30 seconds F-Stop: 257
• LENS: Pinhole FILM: 4x5 Iilford FP4 Plus black & white negative, ISO 125 SHUTTER SPEED: 16 Seconds F-Stop: 257
• LENS: Pinhole FILM: 4x5 Iilford FP4 Plus black & white negative, ISO 125 SHUTTER SPEED: 16 Seconds F-Stop: 257

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Dancing blues

For this shoot, I invited six Cirque du Soleil dancers for a day of fun, photographic choreography and creativity. I “bathed” them in a blueish light, in addition to changing the white balance, to enhance the blue tones to produce an ethereal feel. I had the dancers show me an improvised movement or a partial choreography, and then I used my dance background to correct, modify and mold the final, critical lines destined for capture.
— Jerry Metellus

Dancers:
Vanessa Reyes-Golding,
Greg Sample, Miguel Perez,
Tina Cannon, Sandrine Mattei
and Jacqui Guimond

Now we're cooking

Since late 2008, I’ve been periodically photographing Thomas Keller’s Bouchon in the Venetian hotel-casino. My main goal has been to convey the unseen aspects of fine dining on the Strip: the long hours of hard work and preparation the entire staff puts in — while also maintaining a level of precision that makes the Las Vegas culinary scene so famous. I photograph what the typical dining patron never sees and perhaps never thinks about.

— Sabin Orr

Pinhole wizard

When the idea of a photo issue first came up, I instantly thought of doing a shoot with a pinhole camera. Why go through the trouble in an age of instant photos and digital cameras? Sometimes, slow is more fun: engineering the camera, waiting for the right time to capture the image, processing the film. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t suspense. Relying on my calculations — such as the dimensions of the camera and size of the pinhole, which gave me the base f-stop to set the exposure time — I took each photo with just one exposure, with the hope that when I received the film back, all my math was correct.
— Christopher Smith