I have so much to say about WPPI that I just don’t know where to begin. Since this is the case, I will do what most people would do and that is to start at the beginning. Mel and I had so much fun driving and being silly and reading to each other. The drive took longer than we thought it would and it started getting pretty late. We were driving from Reno to Vegas and there was a police officer in front of me. He was fiddling with his spot lights and Mel (my sister) wondered what he was looking for. Right as she thought that very thought, she looked to the side of the road and saw a car in the ditch. She only saw a small portion of the car, though, because it was in a ditch. She figured that was what the officer was looking for and insisted that I flash my lights to get his attention. We flashed and flashed and flashed some more and finally the cop pulls over onto the side of the road and gets out to start walking toward us. I leaned my head out the window and yelled, “Are you looking for a car in a ditch?” And he says, “Yep, and it would be a lot easier to find it if you weren’t riding my tail and flashing your lights!!!” I say, “well, we saw it about 50 yards back up the road.” and he said, “Well, what color was it?” He said this very gruffly like he was very suspicious that we were up to no good. I looked at Mel since she is the one who saw it and she said, “red” and he said, “Well, that is the color of the vehicle I am looking for. You may pass me.” That version is a little bit abridged for the sake of my fingers, but it was our first adventure.
Our second adventure was that we saw Jose Villa at the trade show!!! Talk about fanfare! It was all Mel and I could do not to run up to him screaming and pulling our hair out Beatles fan style. Turns out that there are a bunch of photography celebrities at the convention, but not only is Jose Villa our favorite, but he also spoke to a small group at the Fuji booth for about half hour. It was a total coincidence that we got to see him speak since there are about 10,000 photographers at the conference and the trade show is huge and we didn’t know he would even be there for that blip of time. His words were so inspiring and I love that he follows his artistic sensibilities more than he follows a proper business sense.
We learned a ton researching the products shown there which was the whole point of going and we found out that we love White House Custom Colors lay flat books. They were awesome and I will be ordering a sample soon!
In the evenings we hung out with Mel’s friends who live there and who we were staying with to save some moolah. It was so fun to see the dancing water at the Bellagio. The city was beautiful with the crisp cool air and blue sky. The huge hotels on the strip laid the foreground of snow covered mountains in the distance. Minus all the corruption of gambling and scantily clad posters everywhere downtown, it was an amazing place!
On the way home we had another crazy adventure. It was the afternoon and we were going north on I-5 coming home when a man driving southbound fell asleep at the wheel and drove through the median and foggered (referencing the old atari game) through a bunch of northbound traffic (us) and over the highway through a fence and into the fruit tree of an apple orchard. How do I know he fell asleep, you may wonder. Well, when he hit the tree, we pulled over and Mel ran over to the car while I called 911. He was dazed, but had no serious injuries and another woman who jumped out of her car to help turned out to be a trauma nurse. It was so surreal to see this all happen right before my very eyes and also to know that the reality is that we could have been seriously injured if the man hadn’t been blessed enough to miss all the traffic. It was a miracle!!
Here are some more pictures from my kids session last week. I am playing with some new actions in photoshop. They aren’t that different, but if you want to, let me know what you think.
