Awards: Honorable Mentions | Smartphone | Landscape/nature | Artistic/abstract | People in the moment | Places | Grand prizeWelcome to Desert Companion’s second annual “Focus on Nevada” photo contest. A quick note before you feast your eyes on the pages of terrific imagery that follow: This year, to bring a heightened mojo to these proceedings, we enlisted a cohort of judges — folks whose aesthetic sophistication jumped the decision-making process to a new level.

Awards: Honorable Mentions | Smartphone | Landscape/nature | Artistic/abstract | People in the moment | Places | Grand prizeWelcome to Desert Companion’s second annual “Focus on Nevada” photo contest. A quick note before you feast your eyes on the pages of terrific imagery that follow: This year, to bring a heightened mojo to these proceedings, we enlisted a cohort of judges — folks whose aesthetic sophistication jumped the decision-making process to a new level.

Awards: Honorable Mentions | Smartphone | Landscape/nature | Artistic/abstract | People in the moment | Places | Grand prizeWelcome to Desert Companion’s second annual “Focus on Nevada” photo contest. A quick note before you feast your eyes on the pages of terrific imagery that follow: This year, to bring a heightened mojo to these proceedings, we enlisted a cohort of judges — folks whose aesthetic sophistication jumped the decision-making process to a new level.

Awards: Honorable Mentions | Smartphone | Landscape/nature | Artistic/abstract | People in the moment | Places | Grand prizeWelcome to Desert Companion’s second annual “Focus on Nevada” photo contest. A quick note before you feast your eyes on the pages of terrific imagery that follow: This year, to bring a heightened mojo to these proceedings, we enlisted a cohort of judges — folks whose aesthetic sophistication jumped the decision-making process to a new level.

Photography by Linda alterwitz (l) fine art , Aaron mayes (A) people, and Jakob McCarthy (J) architecture Why shoot Maryland Parkway instead of, you know, that other big, insanely photogenic street a few miles away? Why, when we assigned these three photographers to capture that elusive quality known as sense of place, did we opt for the understudy instead of the diva? Easy. Visual as the Strip is, we didn’t want the usual dream-factory celebrations.

With a personality to match his flavors, Mike Minor is unleashing his own brand of Mexicue on the massesIt’s late afternoon in downtown Las Vegas and Mike Minor is ready for throngs of hungry locals and tourists to flood the streets at First Friday. Standing inside his new food truck, TruckU Barbeque, he waves a spoon in my face.

The highway we know today as I-15 got its start as a rough, raw, dusty — and sometimes dangerous — road. (Keep an eye out for horse thieves)Interstate 15 is an umbilical cord to Southern California, bringing countless party-minded tourists and profit-driven business trips from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.

02 Alisha KerlinClark County Government CenterRoadrunners: zippy, darty, a blur of motion! What if, artist Alisha Kerlin wondered after seeing a roadrunner doorstop at a swap meet, you turned them into heavy, immobile sculptures with overtones of Italian futurism? That’ll put some meep-meep in the Rotunda Gallery! Roadrunners that Won’t Run Far shows through July 25 in the Clark County Government Center, 500 S. Grand Central Parkway.

Donato Cabrera debuts as conductor for the Las Vegas Philharmonic on September 27. Steve Aoki spins at Hakkasan and Wet Republic. Get the big picture here.

1 Corey Levitan doesn’t want his infant daughter to grow up to be a stripper. “But, crap, good-looking 18-year-old Las Vegas females can earn 10 times what I do in a year by grinding into male crotches to Def Leppard’s ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me,’” he wrote in our May issue.