This week. We're in Las Vegas,
Nevada and we're talking about the struggle to produce more and more content.
Get stop here. This is back country.
Monterey is coming down to the car. That's not a reasonable list of bark
[inaudible].
When you drive the four hours from Los Angeles to Las Vegas,
you have a lot of time to think.
Today I'm thinking about how challenging it is to keep up with the
ever-increasing content demands on us as creators that every single day we have
to be putting out something new to not even get ahead,
but to simply keep pace with the industry.
The content ratchet has increased to a point where just trying to keep up and
consume all of your life's free time,
it's a consistent residual stress that we all have to deal with.
If we don't want to become abandoned businesses on the side of the road,
at least those abandoned businesses are interesting for photography.
If you're into the abandoned roadside America just outside of Las Vegas,
there are a number of cities that you can drive to and do a day trip and find a
band in spaces like this hotel behind us.
I think overall the dirtier and this just more direct the sun and the light
look, the more it kind of adds to the scene rather than distract from the scene,
which if you're in a portrait situation and you're trying to photograph in this
style of light, it's not really going to work out,
but buildings out in the hot sun, I feel like it works really well with me.
I have the 24 to 70 F2.8 on Nikon Z6 and it is really all you need when you're
out for a walk like this.
A 35 mm would also be my second choice I guess for photography of this style.
Greek best heroes sign,
the Greek best heroes place has actually moved and it's one of my favorite stops
here, but right now we're going to photograph their old sign that's up here.
Deep blue sky here is really working well so anything photographed away from the
sun this way just looks really,
really incredibly blue and I like that a lot. I kind of like the symmetry.
What's going on here? There's three tables.
I feel like groups of three are always a good thing for photos and the
background is also very centered. Let's continue on
on the scale of abandoned to destruction.
I feel like this building has been a little bit too vandalized by humans.
The way the framing is actually coming together actually kind of works pretty
well
and then there are some places that are so far gone that they'd become quite
interesting again and this is an example of that just off mountain Springs road
here.
Really a big fan of this sign and the way that it contrast specifically with the
sky,
the nice blue sky and not natural contrast of kind of the the orangy red of the
sign is going to be really cool as well as we're going three weeks get up to
over here cause this is a pretty crazy, this is [inaudible] pretty crazy scene.
Definitely some interesting things going on here and we're going to continue our
journey back to Las Vegas.
Driving into Vegas, you are hit with a lot of content. These casinos,
restaurants, clubs and shows.
They all have dedicated marketing and content teams.
As solo creators though it all just kind of falls on us.
We have to do everything and it's overwhelming.
It's kind of like you're on a treadmill that you can't get off the,
if you stop your business will fail but you also can't really seem to get ahead
regardless of how fast he produced more content. If I can give you any advice,
it is that it really is the long game.
Commit to doing what's reasonable for you and keep at it over time.
Batch process and sit down once a month to schedule everything out.
That way it becomes a once a month task rather than that everyday treadmill.
We just got back from our drive and it is perfect conditions out here right now
and we are kind of scrambling to find the best spot to go. Right now.
This is 10 or under 10 conditions and I don't think we'll see this again for the
rest of the trip, so no time to prepare. It's just go out, get it done, finish.
It looks amazing. Right now I might stop here and grab one handheld shot,
so that's the bridge right there.
I think that we're going to get to how my camera,
I have my 24 to 70 I have 2.8
and it was just to be handheld frames. Keep it easy.
It looks incredible on cord wind down there. Who, okay,
let's get to that bridge. The bridge is completely empty. Nobody's up here.
The most perfect blue hour sunset I've ever seen and no one is taking advantage
of it from this bridge,
which means either nobody's found it yet or it's just a bad angle.
The challenge here is that the glass is kind of dirty.
If you ever are struck with dirty glass,
if you can get your lens as close to it as possible and also shoot wide open if
possible. This works okay,
but not quite as well as I expected it to come up here.
And fortunately blue hour has officially started. What I'm going to do right now
is take a great almost commercial image of Mirage of the waterfall coming down
here with barrage in the background where Raj is,
where my wife Lindsay and I got engaged.
So I think this image has meaning to us who's new year's Eve.
Watch the fireworks from here. And
for this photo specifically,
we'll do an eight second exposure and I'm just gonna bring my f-stop down.
I'm not going to put on an MD. I don't really have time for it.
If I would have had a little bit more time I thought about it.
And then I'm going to set a release to five seconds on the self timer so my
camera can kind of stabilize before it takes the photo.
And that's all from blue hour today in Las Vegas.
I've noticed as a travel photographer that you really have to take advantage of
whatever is happening, that if you, if we would have let that go,
there's a pretty good chance that we're not going to get anything not good for
the rest of the trip. So always be aware,
always try to make it happen when you can.
And even if you're not 100% prepared and ready to go,
just get in there and start making photos and,
and see what comes out and keep iterating from there until you're happy with
results. I then met up with my friend Jeff Butare,
who simultaneously has two of the coolest photography jobs in the world,
A photographer for a UFC ultimate fighting championship and also the team
photographer for the biggest school, the nights. So, and here we are dude.
So ringside you know, it's, it's a three hour,
four hour pregame set up, get your, your computer setup, get the camera set up,
and then we make our photo positions for everybody for whoever is covering the
game. So we manage the photo positions on that end.
So it's a lot more than just showing up to the game, shooting the game,
sending images, and you're gone. Going back to a UFC,
any given fight night we're there at least three hours ahead of the first fight,
a minimum. If we have to do remote cameras or anything more substantial,
we'll get there at least five to six hours.
So I'm shooting from the actual top of the octagon.
And then we also have media lower level, just kneeling,
they call them prayer benches.
They're basically padded areas that you're kind of literally just hunkered in
shooting below through the cage. For the most part,
I shoot above and I run ethernet cable from that position down to the floor,
tape it down across the cable crossover, run it back to my computer media row,
or if it's a bigger event, we'll have onsite editors.
And then it's a much larger system that's set up where everything that's coming
out of my camera goes backstage to a team of editors and they're editing in real
time, sending it for social.com, a Getty images for the distribution,
for news purposes. And all that fun stuff. Will that be tomorrow night?
That will be tomorrow night.
So we've got Conor McGregor and Donald cowboy Serone squared off for the main
event. So yeah, Connor's first fight back in a few years to UFC.
So it's going to be a fun one.
All eyes are going to be on the event and it's going to be a cool,
cool experience.
Jeff is one of the most interesting photographers I know and he'll for sure be
back for a longer segment in the future.
He produces so many images in such a high pressure environment and gets them out
within minutes to the end user. In some ways, this is completely overwhelming,
but in other ways maybe it's easier. There was such hard deadlines,
he knows when he has to deliver. Whereas myself, as a solo creator,
it really doesn't matter to anyone other than myself. I post today,
it's really hard to stay motivated in this content economy and it's something
that I struggle with every single day.
My advice is to give yourself hard deadlines for the things that you need to get
done and don't stress out too much about the non-essentials.
Being a creative can easily consume your entire life,
and it's important to find the work life balance that is right for you.
No one has it figured out,
and it will always be a work in progress as your life and your business evolve.
Thanks for joining us here today in Vegas, and we'll see you next week.