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.
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
