Getting paid for my pictures is always a good time.  My dad's new company needs a photo for each day of the year, minus weekends, that captures Las Vegas.  Thirty photos are due at a time, so here are some from my first deadline.

Today was a photo shoot day!  Portraits are not my favorite pictures to shoot, but if you have a fun person, a nice day, and a nice setting, they can come out really well.  My model, Cassidy Motis, is beautiful and perfect for this shoot.  She played a "flower child" as we teenagers would call it.  For the life of me, I could not think of a good place to shoot something like this.  I wanted grass and fields and flowers and just something green... we live in a desert.  The whole "desert" concept posed a problem.  Thank goodness for Google.  I found a website that gave a number of different places that you could shoot in Las Vegas.  I did not know a few of the places so I looked them up and finally found the perfect one.  Floyd Lamb State Park, 45 minutes away from our houses, is where we found ourselves.  When we got out of the car and looked around we saw peacocks just walking around freely in the grass (Don't worry, they didn't chase us).  Cass and I walked around for a little bit to see what was around and found a ton of old buildings.  They were perfect for this photo shoot.  There were also a ton of huge trees that you would never expect to see in Las Vegas.  It was a sight for sore eyes actually and it was not crowded at all.  We were two of maybe 10 people in the whole area and it was not small so the only creatures that snuck into the pictures were the beautiful peacocks and that was perfectly fine with us.  The lighting ended up being really good even though we went mid afternoon; this is probably because there was plenty of shade.  I definitely would recommend doing more nature type photo shoots at this park.  Admission is $6 per car, but it is completely worth it. It was a great day for photography.

Cityscapes are by far my favorite type of photography.  This past weekend my family and I traveled to San Diego and stayed in the gas lamp district.  From our hotel room balcony, a beautiful view of the city was seen.  At the first chance I got, I retrieved my camera and took a stroll to the balcony for a perfect mid-afternoon photo opportunity.  All of the hotels had American flags on the top, which I loved.  I took a panorama shot on my iPhone and also a few shots on my Canon 60D.  I love San Diego.

There are a few passions of mine and photography happens to be one of them.  This blog will be used to track my photography and travel not only through the summer, but hopefully for a long while.  I'll include travel plans, photo shoot plans, and photo examples- maybe even other things too, if I think about them.  I hope that whoever is reading (or seeing) this blog can not only use it as help in their own photography, but also as a source of inspiration.