I went to a great show this past Saturday at the Casbah, we saw Eleni Mandell live!  She is an American singer-songwriter based in Los Angeles, California, and she flies pretty low under the commercial radar.  Don’t be fooled, she’s awesome.  Her voice is strong and soulful, and she uses it to draw you into her songs like a tractor beam.

Last week was a bit of a whirlwind, we drove up to Las Vegas and back in 2 days for the WPPI Convention and Trade Show at MGM.  This annual convention is huge for wedding and portrait photographers, I took in so much information in such a short amount of time.  This was our first time attending and I’m glad we went, it was definitely beneficial.  The best part was the WPPI Print Competition, we got to see so many amazing images by the best photographers out there.  I’ll be looking to enter some of my images in future competitions.

And then before that, we went to the US 50km National Race Walking Championships!  My second cousin Rachel Lavallee, 2-time Canadian national champ, walked the 20K and won the women’s division!  Even more exciting, she beat her own personal best!  Our good friend Tim Seaman also walked the 20K and won, he is a 2-time Olympian and holds all the US records in race walking.  He walked alongside his newest prodigy, Trevor Barron, who is expected to blow all of Tim’s records out of the water someday.

Since I rambled on incessantly for this post, I’ll post a few photos from the championships to balance it out.

Here’s Jojo waiting on the sidelines, shooting with his vintage Canon FTb film body:

The 3 champs, walking it out!  From left to right: Trevor Barron, Tim Seaman, Rachel Lavallee.

The 3 champs racing neck and neck!

I don’t know this guy’s name, but I believe he may have won in one of the divisions.  He was giving it everything he had here:

Rachel and Trevor in the lead!  Tim’s off in the background trying to catch up:

And catch up he did!  This guy holds all the US records…of course he can catch up!

By the way, Rachel and Tim make the cutest couple!  Here he is congratulating her after she won the 20K, he’s beaming with pride!

We’ll be back next week with some fun images from this weekend’s wedding!