During my first half dozen years out and about in Reno I was not very engaged in my lifelong avocation of photography.  I had recently received my degree in Graduate Gemology, and I was actively employed as a jewelry designer and appraiser.  That all changed around 1989.  Being a longtime auto enthusiast I was attending a Hot August Nights "Show & Shine" event at Rancho San Rafael in Reno.  While there I noticed that the organizers were setting up for an attempt at winning the Guinness world record for largest line dance, what they were calling the "California Grapevine".  Seemed like a worthwhile pursuit to me, so I scoped out the terrain and decided that if I shinnied up this awkward piece of playground apparatus and balanced on top of a 12x12, 15 feet off the ground I could probably get off three frames with my girlfriend's point and shoot.  I was much more fit and agile then.  Hours later the event in fact did transpire, and I captured my planned out panned frames.

About a year later I was at some event and ran into Randy Burke, the HAN executive director.  During our chat, I mentioned that I had these three frames of the entire event.  He got a little excited, as the upshot was that all of his hired photographers had got hundreds of tremendous shots of everyone having fun, the turnstile count, etc.  ---but no shot of the thousands of dancers doing the "hand jive" in unison, all in a single image.  It turns out that Guinness had refused to award him the record without a conclusive image.  He asked me to meet him at his office later, which I did.  He looked at the 4x6 prints and asked how they could be made into a single image.  I taped them together with scotch tape and told them that this could be shot on a copy camera, and the resulting print could be re-touched to complete the small mis-alignments of the velvet ropes and such.  Randy offered to buy the images for a decent amount, but I countered that I would prefer to be the HAN staff photographer, and have unlimited access to all the venue, including the rooftops of any building that I  thought would provide the best vantage.  This happened, though sometimes I had to namedrop and show my all inclusive special pass to convince the security heads of downtown casinos.  From there I got noticed by a number of local movers and shakers, and subsequently was assigned as staff photographer for the top radio station.  Then I got noticed by Dick Clark for his over the top Reno nightclub "American Bandstand",  and it snowballed from there.

I also had a number of years traveling around the state, mostly in County Recorders offices, assisting with creating major gold mine title chains.  I was learning a new skill with my dear friend and sis-in-law (she is my son Cameron's aunt) Tracy Guinand.  If you have ever mined gold in the western United States on an industrial basis, then you are indeed aware of Tracy.  This provided me with numerous and extraordinary opportunities to capture much of what Nevada, and the west, has to offer scenically and historically.  Fortunately most of that was in the digital era, and generally survives.

All of the early work in this gallery [Hot August Nights] was on 35mm, and occasionally medium format film, and it was lost in a storage unit debacle while I was away for a year.  Some of it was scanned during the early new millennium, during the time I had decided to be one of the early bloggers, so not all was completely lost.  I will from time-to-time go into my archives and do the required editing to make them presentable in the mid-2020's, and share them with you.