Greetings from soon to be very hot Las Vegas, Nevada (it's going to be 105℉ to 110℉ the rest of this week) to all my faithful followers, loyal friends, new peeps, and random stumble uponers.
Nevada entered Phase 1 reopening on 10 May 2020. Phase 2 starts on Friday (29 May 2020). Gyms, movie theaters, bars that don't serve food, and bar areas in restaurants, bowling centers, tattoo parlors and other body art establishments, estheticians and makeup artists, and more will be able to reopen in Phase 2.
Casinos will start opening on 04 June 2020 as long as the Nevada Gaming Control Board approves their reopening plans. It's been really weird seeing the Las Vegas Strip so empty. It's going to be different. Limited capacity, fewer spots at table games. Poker rooms will still be closed. At least every other slot machine turned off. Thermal cameras checking temperatures of guests, ubiquitous cleaning crews. Masked dealers and other employees, Acrylic dividers between dealers and players... maybe even between players. Some casinos may even go retro with door persons and elevator operators. And I think valet parking will not be available for a while yet.
I've been working my day job, testing software, from home since 16 March 2020, and just got word that we'll be working from home at least through the end of the year. That's perfectly fine with me. For what we do, software development and testing, we don't really need to be in an office. With Zoom, GoToMeeting, MS Teams, Slack, Skype, and other communication software, plus email, communication isn't a problem. And since my company is worldwide, even when I was working in the office, I was still using those tools to communication with other people around the world. I prefer to work from home. As crazy as this must sound, I find it normally less distracting to work at home than in the open office arrangement we have at our office. Plus I don't have to get up and go outside to vape. So fewer breaks, and a 15 second commute.
kk so what's this all this hullabaloo about being back in business? Well, my last photo session before the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down, was in late February. I reopened my photography business, Phantasy Photos, for photo sessions on 23 May 2020. I put together a set of health safety rules for me and my clients, face coverings/masks, temperature checks, cleaning and sanitizing, and more to keep everyone healthy and safe. I had a client in my home studio on 23 May 2020 too. And I got a sale for $1997 to boot! Now that's reopening on the right foot!
Here's a sample photo from the session. Might be my favorite of all the photos we got.
She's on an in-house payment plan (works like Walmart Layaway), but she intends to pay it off early when she gets her unemployment back pay. I have another client coming in on 30 May 2020, and I expect a sale from that photo session as well because I know the wants to get something for her girlfriend's birthday which was a couple of weeks ago. And @alissagunn is coming back in the studio on 31 May 2020 to shoot at least one new Suicide Girls set.
Here's a peek at her next set, which I think is going to be released to Member Review in late August.
While I was waiting to reopen, I updated my price list, lowering a lot of prices, adding two new premium photo books (new sizes), adding multiple wall art types, overhauling my Dream Shoot Planner (a 34-page PDF magazine describing my boudoir experience photo session in detail), updating automated emails, and a lot more.
I also took some time to go out to Goldfield, Nevada in April to get some Milky Way, star trail, and light painting photos:
I'm not done processing the Milky Way Photos. I got them aligned and stacked, but I need to further edit them and convert them from tifs to jpgs. I'm also going to make a short time lapse video (condensing 2 hours of photos into a video of about 20 seconds or so) from the photos too.
Stay Tuned...
DeadGuitarist
