Photo for the day - Vegas flashback

I love living in the Northwest. I drove from Portland to Seattle yesterday, and in the 3 hours that it took to get here, I saw every weather pattern the Northwest gets. We started in Sandy, Oregon (my stomping grounds), where we had about 4 inches of snow. That was a great surprise, because it's been raining nonstop since we got back from Vegas. We drove our dog to the Kennel in Boring, Oregon, where we drove through about 16 inches of water that was crossing the highway. The rest of the way, we got hail, freezing rain, rain, snow -little wet flakes AND the huge flakes that make driving difficult- overcast, and completely sunny.
I woke up waaaaayyyy too early this morning in my Seattle hotel room and wanted something to do. I realized that I didn't really do any processing on the images from my Las Vegas holiday. I edited them down to my favorites and ran them through Lightroom and posted them to my Flickr account right here
I carried my Lensbaby 3 with me on all the trips, but was too lazy to put it on the camera. One night, as we were wandering around, I was inspired by all the christmas lights to put the Lensbaby on and do some shooting with it. I love that lens - I need to get the Composer version one of these days.
....Anyway, as we wandered through every casino on the strip, I took some time to smell the flowers with my camera. Here's one of the results
Enjoy.

Scream at the Beach

Scream at the Beach
Originally uploaded by ballyhoo photography

I belong to a strobist group here in Portland, and we were allowed access (during the day) to all the haunts.
For you non PDX types, the Scream at the beach is a huge haunted house set that takes up 5 retail locations in a mall in North Portland. Some examples are a mansion, complete with crypt, a mine, an urban zombie-scape, and others. This shot was made in the funhouse (from hell) and this attraction was right after you walk through a 24 foot "squeeze wall" and is in a black room. Nice, huh?
It was so dark in many of the areas, that some of us used flashlights to help our auto focus assist. It was too dark to manually focus. You'd think that cameras were made for use in the light or something.
So, we spent about 6 hours in the haunts, checking out the different scenes and figuring out how to make pretty girls with horrifying makeup look like they fit into the place. Can you say head lamp for finding gear? the best part was - what color is most photo equipment? - finding all of our equipment as we moved from one location to the next. A good number of people were at the mall as we went from haunt to haunt. Girls in make up, guys with bags and stands and cameras. Makeup was done by Matt Huntley.