Home Sweet Home

We are HOME!! We got up at 4am this morning to get our rental car back and to the airport to catch our first flight to salt lake city. It is now 7:30 Pm and we are BEAT :)

Nothing too eventful happened today, but we are sure glad to be home with our puppies and our big comfy bed! The dogs reeked and were totally filthy when we picked them up from the kennel, so a bath was in order for both of them, they too are exhausted! I'm not sure what they do to them at that kennel but they always come home pooped :) Just how we like them!

Tomorrow is the first day of the tattoo convention shoot that Tanya and I are doing, I will be sure to post photos here, I know there will be lots of cool shots with the new gear I brought home from Vegas :) I have a ton of new glass I'm dying to take out and try!

I miss Vegas already, but I am really amped about the new business plans James and I drafted up. I look forward to the new direction we are going to take Litwin photography and we hope to expand into other markets very soon :)

Till tomorrow,

Hope

Thursday - Our Last day in Vegas

Well today was relaxing! We slept in, did a tiny bit of shopping, cleaned our condo, packed our stuff, shipped home our empty boxes from all the stuff we bought and filled up the rental car with a tank of gas....

Oh and James won $512 bucks on video poker in one hand!! LOL we ended up waling away with $400 of it in the end, but still thats pretty damn good and more than we gambled away the entire time we were here, so we are UP!!! Yaya!! :) And we only went over to the casino because I was jonesing for some ice cream :)

Our flight leaves here in 7 hours, so we need to be out of here by 4:30 am to return the car, I better try to catch a few zzzz's, we considered going to see a midnight showing of Will Ferrell's new Movie "Blades of Steel" at the theater across the street, and then pulling an all nighter, but I dont want to feel like crap all day tomorrow while flying and driving back home to lethbridge!

I will leave you with a final photo from Vegas, it is fitting and fun all at the same time. I took this through the windshield of my car with my little P&S Pentax Optio, It was on a billboard.


So for those of you back home, we will see you soon. For those friends we met here who we are leaving behind in vegas and that are returning home to places all over the world, it was a blast! Hope to do it all again next year! Remind me to drink more coffee next time :O)

Stay tuned for more blog posts, we are shooting a cool tattoo convention as soon as we arrive back home :)

Hope

Wednesday - WPPI has ended, now we have 24 hours to vacation :)

Well, things came to a wind down today, we managed to swing back around to the trade show and grab a few last minute deals, Good news Tanya, that 50mm 1.8 is yours to use with the 20D now, LOL Im also adding the sweet 16-85mm wide-angle puppy to your arsenal as we bought a 100mm 2.8 macro and a 28mm 1.8 too today. Lots of new glass and a really cool lighting surprise for you all when we get home too! Flash is quickly going to become an F word in our studio and it will be unacceptable :)

After the trade show closed and there was no money left to spend, we headed out into the cold and visited the Bellagio and Caesars Palace to take some more photos, Nothing too fun but mostly just playing around! I also forgot that when we got seated on our first airplane in Calgary last friday, I discovered a little stow-away in my down vest pocket! One of my favorite little giraffes had snuck into my pocket because he wanted to tag along for the trip, so since I had him with me I figured we might as well make him some souvenir photos that he could take home to his giraffe buddies!

Here he is on the moving sidewalk outside the Bally's Hotel and Casino

And here he is at the Bellagio, waiting in the COLD for the water show to begin, only to find out that the 4:00 show was cancelled due to the wind!


At Caesars there is a TON of cool things to photograph, but the 15ft tall nude male statue was by far the one that caught my eye ;) What can I say? I appreciate art!
We headed into FAO Schwartz and looked at all the cool toys and James snapped this photo of me with a HUGE elephant that was blocking up the broken escalator.
Tomorrow will be a photo day for us, we hope it is a bit nicer so we can possibly get at least a LITTLE tan before coming home to the snow that we have been warned about :) Hopefully we can do it all again next year! And if our staff is lucky, they can come along and join us!

Till tomorrow....

Hope

Tuesday - WOW!

We had an another awesome day down here in Las Vegas, it was COLD and it rained, but other than those two minor bad things, the rest of the day was amazing! We had a really cool photo session down at the Flamingo Hotel where we got married 5 years ago with this amazing photographer from Ontario named Krista Jefferson. She did a really cool little session and braved the cold for us so we could have some nice professional photos for our 5 year anniversary. Here is a small sample of the images she took, she's was really truly a doll to work with and I LOVE the way these pics turned out!! THANKS KRISTA!!!This last photo is a fun one because Krista saw this adorable elderly couple sitting at the cafe tables having their lunch and she set up the shot so they would be in the background on purpose, so sweet and sentimental! There are a ton more photos and they are all amazing :)

After our fun photo shoot it was back to "work" lol and the session I have been looking forward to the most during this whole trip, Mister David Jay! This guy is seriously amazing! He is young and passionate and full of ideas and he has become somewhat of a mentor to me without him even knowing it! I read his posts on forums every chance I get and I follow his work as best as I can and getting to hear him speak was really cool!


Now just when I thought it was cool that I was sitting in the front row of a David Jay session, it got even better :) David was talking about blogging and how it is a great thing to do when he stopped himself and announced that he needed to take a photo for HIS blog of us all in the room, he went to grab his camera and then realized that it wasnt in the bag he had with him at the front, so I offered him mine! LOL He snapped a shot of the entire room full of people with my camera :) Here is the shot David Jay took!
Thanks David for the opportunity to see you and meet you, and thanks for taking this photo for our blogs :)

After Davids session, we headed right down to another session with Michele Celentano. Her session was also very inspiring and HILARIOUS I might add. I think that today was the day when the seeds of change were planted and we look forward to making some big changes at Litwin photography over the next 6 months!! We have some major changes planned and we are both very excited about everything that this is going to bring. Yesterday we were germinating the seeds and today they got firmly placed int he soil!!! I cant wait to see what tomorrow brings :)

Well, it is 2am, and we are down in the main reception area typing away on our laptops, I suppose it is time to head back up to our room and call it a night!

Until tomorrow....

Hope

Sunday and Monday - Man are we tired!

Well, where do we start?? JEEZE, the last two days have been NUTS around here! There have to be a good 4000-5000 people registered at WPPI and it is crazy :)

Yesterday started bright and early and headed to the strip to pick up our tickets for the evening show of Cirque du Soliel's Zumanity. We then headed over to the Tropicana to check out a show that I have been dying to see for a long time called "Bodies". It is a combination of art/science where this guy has had people donate their bodies to him in death to preserve in different ways to illustrate how human bodies work and what they look like from every possible way. Kind of grotesque, but utterly fascinating! So we wandered over to the Tropicanan to see this show only to find out that it was going to cost us $33USD each to get in and we could bring in our backpacks (which contained all of our camera gear) so we had to bail on those plans in the end :(
We had a great little lunch at the MGM Grand Rain forest Cafe which is this super cool rainforest themed restaurant filled with animals and rain :) After that we headed out to do some more shopping at the outlet malls. I'm not going to get into it, but I can't find a single watch or pair of shoes I like at any of these amazing outlet stores, but at home, where things are full price, I can find millions.....figures, lol.


We zipped home to change, then had to zip out again to get to the WPPI Welcome reception that began at 6:30. The amount of people there was amazing and I know that there were even more earlier because we came a bit late and lots of people were already leaving. After the reception is was back to New York New York for us to get ready for the Cirque Show! We got there a bit ealry and so we decided to gamble a bit, this time we actually WON a bit of $$ (which was a welcome change!)

The show was AWESOME and I would recommend it to anyone who is very open minded and quite liberal in their views as it was of an adult nature and the audience participation is a-plenty! LOL Lets just say I shared my sofa not only with my husband, but also a sexy spanish fellow named Antonio :O) Did I mention Antonio was wearing no shirt and gold leather pants? LOL Good times were had by all and Antonio visited us regularly throughout the entire show!

We got home around 1am, and off to bed by 2am, back up at 7am for the Doug Gordon & Kevin Kubota seminar at 8:30 this morning. The seminar was AMAZING and extremely helpful for us, we are coming home with a whole new outlook on business and some fantastic new marketing strategies that are going to knock the socks off of the Lethbridge photography market!

After Doug and Kevin's Session, the trade show floor opened and we hit it with a vengeance! There are over 400 vendors in 2 HUGE ballrooms and getting lost was half the fun, I have to say that I saw sooo many neat products and demonstrations but my favorite part of it all was buying my new Canon 5D camera, 24-105mm 4.o Lens, and FINALLY...... My 70-200mm 2.8L IS Lens that I have been DYING to get for the longest time! I am sooooo excited and the camera has been glued to my face since I got it :) I also got a sweet HUGE backpack on rollers that carries ALL of my gear PLUS my laptop, and i got AMAZING deals on all of it!!!

I am posting my photos for the day at the bottom of this post since there was SO much to write, and even more happened, I am just too darn tired to bother typing about it all :) So we'll have to catch you up when we get home!! More to come tomorrow, Miss you all!

Hope

Here is James enjoying his corn pops and pepsi for breakfast this morning (sitting on the floor of the convention center in paris waiting for the trade show doors to open)Here is a photo I took right after I got my 5D of some models doing a demonstration at one of the exhibitors booths. He had them modelling with other people's cameras to demonstrate how it would help us relate to the subject matter of his images. I shot this with my 5D and 70-200 2.8 lens. This was shot on a white background setup so I didn't really do any post processing to it.

Here is a photo I took of James back at the hotel, again with the new camera, I am floored by the clarity in his eyes in this photo on the full size image, it is truly stunning!

Comments anyone?

Just in case you didn't know you could..... you CAN leave comments! Wed love to hear from you! Just keep them nice as this blog is on business domain :) Nothing dirty or flirty :) LOL

I think I should get off to bed, I cant wait until tomorrow, we have COOL plans in store but you have to wait till then to find out what they are :)

Saturday - Registration Day

Well today we got up early after a fantastic night's sleep and we headed out in our little vibe to explore the desert around vegas. We threw the GPS system on and ended up at Hoover Dam. We skipped the dam tour but brought our cameras to shoot some photos. I won't post too many here, but they will be show eventually (I promise!)

After that we went for a little scenic hike to check out some view of lake Meade. It was a hot sunny day with beautiful clear blue skies. A perfect day for a walk in the desert! We found some cute lizards and chipmunks and birds, and of course we snapped a few shots :)

When our desert trip ended we headed back down to the famous Las Vegas Strip to register for the WPPI convention at Bally's. Afterall, that IS what we came here for ;O) It was a bit of a gong show finding the registartion room as they don't like to label things very well in the WPPI organization, lol, But after we grabbed our convention gear and passes we felt official. There are a TON of photographers here and everyone in Bally's and Paris seemed to be wearing the nifty blue name tag lanyards.

Bally's is across the street from the Flamingo, which just happens to be where we got married, so we headed over there to visit our wedding site. Upon poking my head into the indoor chapel to be nosey, I saw the minister tha married us standing there behind the counter! LOL. I asked him to come outside and take a photo with us and explained to him that he married us 5 years ago, he was super friendly (just as I remembered him) and he gladly popped outside for a photo! I only had my 20D on me so I threw it into autopilot mode and grabbed the nearest stranger, instructed her to just point the camera and push the button and away we went! Not the best photo, but still a great snapshot of a very cool moment for us!

Friday - Our Arrival

After a night with very little sleep on a couch, a very early morning, and two airplanes, we have arrived!

Our first flight was on a rather small 50 seater jet that when boarding seemed VERY tight a bit scary, however, it turned out to be an awesome flight that was quick, smooth and quiet! We flew in to Salt Lake City around 10:30am and headed through a really packed airport over to another terminal to catch our connecting flight to vegas.

What I have realized is that the weather is always beautiful when you are above the clouds!

We flew into vegas on a larger plane, it was less smooth, but my nerves were all gone after the first flight so it was still great! We landed at noon and the sun was shining away, the palm trees and hot air were a welcome sight after a good week of Lethbridge wind and dirt.

After grabbing our luggage, we headed off to the car rental lot and picked up a sporty black pontiac vibe equipped with a neato GPS system, we drove to out condo and dropped off our stuff.

We eneded up heading over to the Mandalay Bay resort and Casino on the strip and visited the Shark Reef there, it was sweet, it took us about 40 minutes to walk through and we were really wishing we had the Canon 20D with us instead of the little point and shoot pentax optio :) I snapped lots of fun pix but I will post only one for now of the jellyfish, they were one of my favorite things to see. Did you know Jellyfish have no brains or hearts?

Stay tuned for tomorrow's blog and photos! I will be bringing my Canon 20D along for any adventures we may have. In the meantime, i am going to start my vacation :)

Hope

Heading to WPPI in Las Vegas!

Well we are just in the final stages of packing and planning for our trip to the WPPI convention in Las Vegas.

We are driving to Calgary tomorrow and our flight leaves Calgary international airport at 8:30 on Friday morning, come noon we will be in Las Vegas and our fun will begin.

The wonderful thing about this trip is that not only are we going to learn all sort fo great new things, but we are going with the intention on upgrading a lot of our gear, including a new Canon 5D DSLR camera and a new Canon 30D DSLR camera. I am also looking at some new lenses including the 70-200mm 2.8L IS lens :) I have wanted that baby forever!

We will be updating this blog daily (well, that's the plan!) and filling everyone in on the happenings of WPPI! We have 3 prints entered into the 16x20 print competition, judging is on the weekend when we arrive so Im quite excited to see what the outcome of that will be for us. We will definately post news and pix as things happen, we have a rental car so we plan on doing a bit of exploring (and shopping).

Stay tuned!

Hope