Las Vegas is only a short flight from San Francisco, and one thing that Vegas has in large supply is cheap hotel rooms. More specifically, cheap hotel rooms that are spacious. And spacious hotel rooms are a lot better for taking photos in because there’s usually more interesting backgrounds to actually take photos with, and there’s also a lot more space to move a camera around in. So far I’ve done a shoot in The Cosmopolitan and a very short shoot in The Linq after flying to vegas while dressed. This time around, we’re hitting up The Flamingo!
The thing I look for most in a hotel room (other than price) is photogeneity – is this an interesting room that will look good in photos. For that reason, I generally look for a suite with an interesting colour palette. The Flamingo definitely had that in the Forever Fab Suite. Very pink, with nice light, and lots of nice interesting features.
Honestly, I feel like I might be starting to run out of good hotel rooms that are a bit funky and interesting, so we’ll see how many more of these that I do (No joke, if you have suggestions of nice rooms/hotels I could do photoshoots in, email me!). At least for now, this room fit the bill well. I jetted off and snagged a boudoir shoot the first day I landed, so day 2 was all down to me.
I woke up in pain from the day before – boudoir shoots hurt! They posed me in myriad uncomfortable ways, that looked fucking amazing, so I feel like I generally learned a lot about posing. I’ll let you be the judge of the photos below as to whether or not I picked up some new skills.
Conscious of the fact that it was winter with limited hours of daylight, I tried to get my butt into gear as quickly as possible. I woke up early, but was maybe a bit too slow to get going, and picked a breakfast place a little too far away, as I’d probably burned an hour or so of good daylight before I actually got back to the hotel room to start getting ready. It was also going to be a bit of a gloomy day, and the cloud cover didn’t help my lighting situation. In any case, we began on the bed.
I really like this bag. I’ve never actually used it, and the only reason I lugged it with me to a different state is solely for those few pictures, SO ENJOY IT. I generally like to try and get a few different poses from each outfit, so away to the couch next! This dress is definitely going into the work-outfit rotation.
As is the next one, actually. It’s very clean and professional, and photographs well! I love this window shot, although the lighting is a bit iffy, given that it’s mostly only coming from behind me. The one thing I didn’t like about this room is that most of the lighting came from one side, so I had to account for that a lot in where I was posing.
Those shoes are gorgeous also! A bit uncomfortable, so I doubt I’ll be wearing those to work, which is a bit of a shame. The next few photos were a little bit tricky. I originally had myself standing next to the dresser, but it’s only very small, and since I’m over 6ft in heels, it had the effect of making me look like a giantess. This was not a good look. Moving in front of the dresser helped with that immeasurably.
This room had a couple of pink rugs which I desperately felt I had to include. I’ve had this particular shot in my head for a while and never really had a nice floor to shoot it in. Thanks, Flamingo!
These next few with the pink stockings tell almost a classic 90s porn-magazine story. As per usual I don’t give the goods away, but it still feels like the most pornographic thing I’ve ever done.
Look at the office worker, tapping away at her computer! Oh it’s so warm, let me remove my cardigan! My leg is quite sore today, I must rub it and fiddle with my hair. Oh! You have seen me! Well let me adjust my stockings while I sensually meet your gaze!
Oh my my dress has mysteriously disappeared! Excuse me while I attempt to search for it from the vantage point of this large pink couch thing! Maybe it is on the floor back here…
Nope! Oh well, I suppose I must give up now. Unless… maybe if I sleep with the photographer, they can help me locate my dress!
Ok enough of that.
Disclaimer: I don’t actually know how 90s porn-magazine shoots went down, but I’m assuming it’s something like that.
This wall might be my favourite thing about this room. Also as much as I love these shoes, there’s something about the next photo where I’m barefoot that I like a lot that I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it feels a little more raw and personal? I might explore that more in future shoots.
This might be my favourite shot of the whole set. Also bonus shot of my phone which has the camera trigger THAT I BUILT to take photos. If you zoom in real close, you might be able to see some thumbnails of the last 8 photos I took!
This navy dress I like a lot. I don’t know if I’ll ever wear it again, because it screams “bridesmaid“, and I doubt that I’ll ever be one (and not that I want to be one anyway, Though a friend invited me to do a reading at a her wedding once, and that was awesome). If I were to happen, I’d likely have to match with all the other bridesmaids, and presumably that would mean wearing something other than this dress. Ah well, it’s still a nice dress. At this point in the day I was losing a lot of light, so for the first time ever, I resorted to using the flash. I don’t have much experience with it, so I sunk some time into figuring out wtf was happening, poking around at a lot of settings, and also learning a bit more about what kind of shutter speeds you need with a flash. In the past, I was pretty convinced that the flash was broken. It turns out that it was not, and I just didn’t know what I was doing.
These shoes are amazing…ly painful. Gorgeous, but they may never see the outside world unless I get a lot more practice in them and maybe add something more frictional(?) to the bottom, because they’re a bit slidy. In this next picture I tried to do something I’d never really done before – attempt to capture a feeling of motion. It went ok. I’ll work on that more for next time.
Also another thing I’d never done in a photoshoot before: attempt to capture some headshots. I have the lenses for it, but it was never really something I thought about, Having some nice backgrounds help a lot! I think I’ll try and do more of this in the future.
You can usually tell when I’m getting tired when doing a photoshoot, because I start to look, annoyingly grumpy. That’s because towards the end I’ve been doing this for an absurd number of hours and don’t take meal breaks. I also struggled with the next few shots trying to get the composition right. I’m not incredibly happy with the result, but they’re not so bad as to be destined for the rubbish bin.
The next few made up for it though. If you’re paying close attention, you’ll notice I moved the camera closer while keeping my feet in the same spot, and I turned the chair to face the camera a bit more, so it feels a bit more intimate, and the photos seem a bit less empty. Composition +1! Maybe I should actually take a photography class. That’s not a bad idea, actually…
Headshots again! I’m digging it.
Well, that’s all she wrote. We only went and bloody did it again! If my hunt for another cheap, photogenic suite in Las Vegas goes well, you’ll probably see another one of these. If not, I’ll have to improvise! Closer to summer though, when the number of hours of daylight is a lot higher and I can get more hours of photography in, assuming I can take a lunch break or something.
xx