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Photography: Gritty Vegas

The last few weeks I was in Vegas with my daughter and her best friend house-sitting. I’ve been doing a lot of polished portraits lately, so I used this as an excuse to play with a different style of photography. For these, I really embraced grain as it seems to fit the grittiness of the city. I tried to focus more on composition and on catching interesting moments. These photos are from Fremont Street and edited to give them a more documentary feel.

How did I do?

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#25 (Bonus: I found Elvis sleeping in the mall!)
  • These were taken with my Olympus E-M1 MarkII, 12-50mm lens.

22 thoughts on “Photography: Gritty Vegas”

    • Thanks! I’ll share a few more tomorrow. It’s such a strange place, with stories playing out in all directions with people from all over the world. I found the people watching top notch. The blur one was one of my favorites too, and I actually did it on purpose 🙂

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      • Nice blur! ☺️ Vegas is a very strange town ya never know what’s gonna happen. I may have mentioned before that I don’t visit the strip or Fremont for my own safety but do know that I am missing out on some great photos ops as you have proven! At 65, I’m not as able-bodied…

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    • That’s so kind of you to say! I’ve struggled with getting shots that work in that kind of light, and that means the world to me. When I stumbled on sleeping Elvis, I giggled. It felt like a Vegas only type thing that would happen.

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  4. By ‘gritty’ do you mean garish, tacky, tasteless fun? I love all the shots which together I imagine sum up Vegas. (Here ‘gritty’ might mean a grim, mean industrial or post-industrial area.) My mother was in Vegas with friends a few times when she was younger, just to experience the place. Your daughter sums up universal teen angst in that shot 🙂

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    • Yeah, Vegas is…WEIRD! There’s so many different people and things happening at once. It’s interesting from an outsider view, but I wouldn’t want to have to work in any of those casinos. I imagine it would get old really fast.

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  5. I think you did a fantastic job. Stepping away from polished portraits and embracing a grainier, documentary style was a bold creative choice, and it seems to have paid off beautifully. The gritty texture feels perfectly suited to the energy and character of Fremont Street, adding authenticity and atmosphere to the images.

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    • You are so kind! Thank you. It’s hard to find my style as a photographer, and I’ve really been pushing myself lately to figure out what that means for me. I’m happy you found these to work for you.

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