60's fashions and Vegas sands w/ vintage pinup, Eden Eve!

Good afternoon to all! I’m recovering from yesterday’s STEEM flash. When I joined Steemit, it was August of last year. My first reward was huge and that’s what sank the hook, but once I began making friends and becoming familiarized with the community, I just used Steemit as a platform to share my life, my work and my art. It was an outlet for my creativity; decentralized and incentivized. I continued posting through the lows when STEEM was below $0.10. I’d had conversations with @customnature […my brother] about what would happen if it ever bounced back to $1, or $2. They were just hypotheticals, but yesterday, those hypotheticals were becoming very, very real. By the time STEEM peaked at $2.79, I realized my account was valued at half of what I’d need to pay off my house! My STEEM POWER was worth more than my annual income for all of 2016! Seriously, take a moment for that to sink in! This is a place where that was earned in less than a year on sweat equity! Incredible, and I know it’s just getting started.

I can’t believe I haven’t already shared this shoot with everyone! This was from a couple years ago. Once I began shooting in LA, I was quickly woven in with the elite names of the vintage/pinup community. During a trip from LA to Las Vegas, I’d met a beautiful, talented fair skinned, red-headed flower child named Candace Campbell. We set up a quick shoot before I left town and during that shoot is when I met the bombshell featured in today’s post, Eden Eve. 

Eden and Candace are still close friends of mine, and I feel it appropriate to introduce Candace before Eden because they are still, more or less, inseparable. They own a small vintage consignment shop together in downtown Vegas, and a salon in the separate building. Candace is is a world class make-up artist […and model], and Eden is a brilliant vintage hair stylist. A really cool aspect of my shoots and friendship with both ladies is that they possess a unique 70’s vibe to their physical esthetics, clothes and style. It’s refreshing since many of the models I work with in the pinup scene are strictly dedicated to the style and culture of the 1940’s and 50’s.

Eden and I planned for this shoot leaving the entire day available to shoot in two locations. The first hour, we made at the Rio hotel, shooting a variety of 60’s and 70’s sleepwear looks. Hotel shoots are typically my least favorite as I struggle to make the room look like anything but a hotel […especially Vegas tourist hotels like the Rio that are sadly uninteresting]. I managed to come up with two ideas that were able to get around the bland decor, shooting tight with Eden literally in her open suitcase, and a second wrapped in the white curtains by the window. Balancing the exposure in those conditions can be difficult, but with some shutter speed and ISO tinkering, I was able to achieve an even, sharp shot with a very intimate intensity.

Eden and I left the hotel and made our way to Lake Mead. A dried lake bed about 40 miles outside of Las Vegas. I’ve seen this location shot a million times, and although I’d never photographed in a dry lake bed, I was determined to come up with my own, unique approach. I’d always known Eden was an exceptional model, but during this concept, she became an entirely different woman. Her intensity was off the charts, confident and intimidating. Her commitment to the photos was unreal as she rolled and crawled across the cracked dry sand. Those adrenaline rush moments that happen so rarely when creating art; when you just know you’re capturing something incredible. 

I’m hoping 2017 has another shoot for me and Eden […or Candace, or both for that matter] in store. I love that Steemit gives me the opportunity and incentive to look through some of my older shoots. Seeing them completely takes me back to the excitement of making this images that night. I just did a new edit of this shoot just before making this post. Here it is below, hot off the HD.

Thanks for reading. For more photography, art, illustration and design, please follow my blog here at @kommienezuspadt.