After the completion of my annual Death Valley workshop on night photography I had to head to Los Angeles to teach a few classes for Samy’s Camera and also speak to a camera club in Santa Barbara. When I was about to leave Death Valley I realized I would be heading into LA at the height of traffic. If you have been to LA, you know how much you want to avoid this if possible!

After asking Siri, I figured out that it would only add an hour total to my trip if I headed to Las Vegas for lunch. There is a great Mediterranean restaurant in the Cosmopolitan that has a 3 course set lunch for about $25 that could be one of the best food deals in Las Vegas (I am a serious foodie, I just don’t burden you with pics of meal that passes through these lips). Anytime I am passing through Las Vegas during their lunch hours I make it a point to head there.

Once I finished my meal and started to head to my car to commence my drive to LA, I noticed an abundance of people wearing green. Now, I don’t drink and I was in the desert for a week and a half previous to this with next to no outside communication, so I had no idea that I stumbled into Las Vegas on St Patrick’s Day. As a street photographer I felt I had a duty to wander around and capture some life happening. I also ended up filming a few time lapses through the evening, but the shot at the top of this post stood out to me after the night was over.

At first I of course noticed the sea of green in front of me and that the only person looking into the lens was wearing a pope hat. After I showed the image to a friend she notices that out of all the “happy people” wandering around Las Vegas on this tipsy holiday, only two people in the background of the image are smiling.

Now I’m not really sure if this is a reflection of the true psyche of the average drunken Vegas wanderer or just a coincidence at the time I snapped the shutter, but it certainly is a picture that is worth a thousand words.