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Conference headshot booth setup for Las Vegas corporate events by Henry David Photography
Las Vegas, NV

Trade show and corporate photography in Las Vegas

One photographer, flown in from St. Louis for the show floor, the keynote room and the headshots your team still needs when the booth comes down.

Las Vegas is where the country's trade shows happen. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority has documented the city being named the No. 1 trade show destination in North America for 25 consecutive years on the TSNN Top Trade Shows list, and convention attendance across the valley reached 6 million in 2025. The Las Vegas Convention Center alone is on pace for an estimated 1.2 million trade show attendees in 2026, up from 1 million in 2025, helped by the triennial return of CONEXPO-CON/AGG. For a company that exhibits, that concentration is the reason to make the trip. One week puts the booth, the leadership team and the customer base inside the same halls, and it is the only week of the year when all three are in one place.

Most of the Las Vegas Strip is not in the City of Las Vegas. The 4.2 mile resort corridor sits immediately south of the city limits in the unincorporated towns of Paradise and Winchester, in Clark County, and so does most of the convention space. The Las Vegas Convention Center at 3150 Paradise Road is in unincorporated Clark County despite a Las Vegas, NV 89109 mailing address. The Venetian Expo stands at 201 Sands Avenue in Paradise. Mandalay Bay anchors the south end of the corridor, Allegiant Stadium sits west of it across Interstate 15, and Sphere sits east of the Strip. Downtown Las Vegas, the incorporated city itself, is north of all of it. Distances that look short on a map walk long in practice, so a show day gets planned by building rather than by address.

A company's show calendar and its office calendar produce the same photographs for different reasons. Booth portraits made in Las Vegas in January end up beside headshots made at headquarters in March, on the same team page, and the mismatch is obvious when two photographers made them. Lighting, crop, background treatment and retouching all drift. Booking one photographer across both keeps a single standard, and the person shooting your booth already knows how your people are lit at home. We work out of St. Louis and travel to the markets our clients work in, so the Las Vegas trip and the office day belong to one relationship instead of two vendor searches. The result is one library of images that matches everything else the company publishes.

How the valley is laid out

Where the venues and the business districts sit, and which municipality each one is really in.

Las Vegas Strip resort corridor

Paradise and Winchester, unincorporated Clark County

The 4.2 mile run of resort convention space, from Mandalay Bay at the south end north past Aria, the Cosmopolitan, Caesars Forum, MGM Grand, the Venetian Expo, Wynn and Encore, and Resorts World. It is Clark County, not the City of Las Vegas, and the distinction matters for permits and for anyone reading an address off a show kit.

Convention center district, Paradise Road

Unincorporated Clark County

The Las Vegas Convention Center campus at 3150 Paradise Road, owned and operated by the LVCVA, with the 2021 West Hall expansion on its west side and Loop stations serving the halls. Sources disagree about whether the campus falls in Winchester or Paradise, so unincorporated Clark County is the honest answer.

Downtown Las Vegas

City of Las Vegas

The incorporated city sits north of the Strip and north of the convention center district. Companies that describe themselves as being in Las Vegas are sometimes here and sometimes in the county, and a shoot plan should know which before the day starts.

Winchester and Paradise, the unincorporated towns

Clark County

Two separate unincorporated towns that Clark County administers jointly for planning purposes. Between them they hold the Strip, the convention center campus and much of the meeting space that a visiting exhibitor will ever see.

Interstate 15 west side, Allegiant Stadium

Paradise, unincorporated Clark County

Allegiant Stadium stands west of Mandalay Bay and west of Interstate 15, with event spaces that scale from 25 people to a full venue buyout. Getting a person and cases from a Strip hall to this side of the freeway is a logistics question, not a walk.

What Las Vegas actually does for a living

Different industries need different things photographed. These are the ones that shape the work here.

Consumer technology

CES fills the Las Vegas Convention Center and additional venues each January. The 2026 edition ran January 6 to 9 with 148,392 attendees, more than 4,100 exhibitors including roughly 1,200 startups, and a show floor over 2.6 million square feet, with figures third-party audited to UFI standards.

Product demonstrations caught with real hands on the device, plus clean executive portraits made in a quiet corner before the aisles fill.

Broadcast and media production

NAB Show returns to the Las Vegas Convention Center each spring. The 2026 show ran April 19 to 22 with more than 58,000 registered attendees from 146 countries and more than 18,000 companies, across roughly 550 sessions on 11 stages.

Stage and session coverage that holds up under mixed LED and tungsten light, and booth footage that shows workflow rather than signage.

Construction and heavy equipment

CONEXPO-CON/AGG takes the convention center indoors and outdoors every third year, with 140,116 registrants across March 3 to 7, 2026 and more than 3 million square feet of exhibit space. World of Concrete works the same halls and the Silver and Bronze Lots each winter.

Machines photographed at scale in outdoor lots, with operators and customers in frame so the equipment reads as working rather than parked.

Automotive aftermarket

SEMA took over the entire Las Vegas Convention Center for its 2025 show, November 4 to 7, with more than 2,300 exhibiting brands and roughly 160,000 attendees from 140 countries. AAPEX runs the same week at the Venetian Expo and Caesars Forum, with more than 2,700 exhibitors and 5,500 booths in 2025.

Build and vehicle detail work shot around crowds, plus a same-week plan for teams splitting staff between two venues.

Apparel and sourcing

MAGIC Las Vegas runs across the LVCC West, Central and South Halls, with more than 2,600 exhibiting brands from more than 45 countries for August 10 to 12, 2026. The umbrella covers MAGIC, MAGIC MENS, SOURCING at MAGIC and the Off-Price Show.

Product and booth imagery that reproduces color accurately, shot fast enough to feed a line sheet or a buyer follow-up the same week.

Conventions and trade shows: the reason we are in Las Vegas

Conference and trade show work is the main reason a St. Louis photography and video company travels to Las Vegas at all. The valley runs the largest concentration of exhibit space in the country, and an exhibitor's needs are specific: booth photography that survives aisle traffic, portraits of people who have four spare minutes, session and keynote coverage in rooms built for 5,000, and a set of files usable for the recap deck, the sales follow-up and next year's booth graphics. The venues below are the ones that carry the shows, and the shows below are the ones that set the calendar.

Las Vegas Convention Center

3150 Paradise Road, owned and operated by the LVCVA, which describes the campus as 4.6 million square feet with 2.5 million square feet of exhibit space. The $1 billion West Hall expansion debuted in June 2021 and added 1.4 million square feet, including 600,000 square feet of exhibition space with 328,000 square feet column free, billed as the largest column-free exhibition space in North America, plus 150,000 square feet of meeting rooms. Designed by tvsdesign. Reporting at the June 2021 opening described the expanded campus as among the largest in the country. World of Concrete was the first major show in the new West Hall, in June 2021.

The Venetian Expo

201 Sands Avenue, Paradise. Known as Sands Expo from 1990 to 2021, it won county approval in October 1989 for a convention center of roughly 1.1 million square feet capacity and opened November 9, 1990. Hall A alone runs 178,000 square feet under a 32.5 foot ceiling, and the building holds more than 300,000 square feet of column-free exhibition halls. Home to SHOT Show, AAPEX and HIMSS26.

Mandalay Bay Convention Center

Over 2 million square feet of total meeting space at the south end of the corridor, described as the fifth largest convention space in North America. About 75 meeting rooms and four ballrooms, including a 70,000 square foot ballroom called one of the largest pillarless ballrooms on the West Coast, with a 20,000 square foot foyer in front of it.

CAESARS FORUM

550,000 square feet holding two 110,000 square foot ballrooms and two 40,000 square foot ballrooms. Announced at groundbreaking as a $375 million conference center and opened October 25, 2020. Co-hosts SHOT Show and AAPEX with the Venetian Expo, which means crews often work both buildings in the same week.

MGM Grand Conference Center

850,000 square feet of meeting space across three floors. The Marquee Ballroom runs 92,000 square feet and is pillarless, alongside a 49,000 square foot ballroom, a 32,000 square foot ballroom and three smaller ballrooms, all divisible into 57 breakout rooms, which is the floor plan a breakout-heavy program ends up needing.

Wynn Las Vegas and Encore

An expansion added 300,000 square feet of new event venues, bringing total function space to 560,000 square feet across 226 meeting rooms. It includes an 83,000 square foot pillarless ballroom, a 2,500 square foot lounge with a 72 foot LED video wall, and an open-air pavilion and garden overlooking the Wynn Golf Club's 18th fairway and waterfall.

ARIA Resort & Casino

A $170 million, 200,000 square foot East Convention Center expansion began in May 2016 and opened in February 2018, taking the resort's convention space to about 500,000 square feet across four floors. Indoor and open-air verandas with retractable windows look out over The Park and T-Mobile Arena. Most guest rooms reach the East Convention Center in under five minutes without crossing the casino floor, which matters when a portrait session is running in shifts.

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas

3708 Las Vegas Boulevard South. Seven ballrooms from 7,000 to 40,000 square feet and 46 meeting rooms. The 3rd floor is the largest meeting floor at 100,000 square feet, the 4th floor holds the largest ballroom at 37,000 square feet plus two more ballrooms and 17 meeting rooms, and the 2nd floor totals 20,000 square feet with nine meeting rooms and two boardrooms around a 10,000 square foot common area.

Resorts World Las Vegas

Opened June 2021 with over 250,000 square feet of flexible meeting and event space, more than 50 meeting rooms and six ballrooms. The flagship Event Center spans 50,000 square feet and holds up to 5,000 attendees. A separate 370,000 square foot convention center has since been announced. It was the first resort connected to the Vegas Loop, in 2022.

Allegiant Stadium

In Paradise, west of Mandalay Bay and west of Interstate 15. Capacity 65,000, expandable to 71,835, home of the Las Vegas Raiders, opened in 2020 at approximately $1.9 billion. For private events it offers over 10 different spaces, scalable from 25 people up to a 65,000 person full venue buyout.

Sphere

In Paradise, east of the Strip. Seats 17,600 with a total capacity of 20,000, built around a 16K resolution wraparound interior LED screen, and the most expensive entertainment venue ever built in Las Vegas, above Allegiant Stadium's roughly $1.9 billion. Anything photographed inside a room like this is a lighting problem first and a composition problem second.

Las Vegas Festival Grounds

311 West Sahara Avenue, at the southwest corner of Sahara Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard at the north end of the Strip. 37 acres with a capacity of 85,000, developed by MGM Resorts International with its first event on May 8, 2015 and sold to Phil Ruffin in 2019. Multiple stages, outdoor pavilions, vendor areas, 400 permanent restrooms and a dedicated 7.5 acre transportation zone.

Shows that come here

CES

Las Vegas Convention Center plus additional venues. CES 2026 ran January 6 to 9, 2026 with 148,392 attendees, up 4% year over year, more than 4,100 exhibitors including about 1,200 startups, and a show floor of more than 2.6 million square feet. International attendance was 55,841, or 37.6%, from 141 countries, regions and territories, alongside 2,162 investors and 7,037 media, content creators and industry analysts. Figures are third-party audited to UFI standards.

NAB Show

Las Vegas Convention Center. The 2026 show ran April 19 to 22 with more than 58,000 registered attendees from 146 countries, drawn from more than 18,000 companies, up from 12,000 in 2025. More than 1,100 exhibitors including 132 first-time exhibitors, roughly 550 sessions, more than 630 speakers and 11 stages. 48% of attendees were first-timers and 22% traveled from outside the US.

CONEXPO-CON/AGG

Las Vegas Convention Center, triennial. The 2026 edition ran March 3 to 7 with 140,116 registrants, made up of 105,609 attendees plus 34,507 exhibitor personnel, more than 2,000 exhibitors and more than 3 million square feet of exhibit space across indoor halls and outdoor lots. The 2023 edition drew more than 139,000.

SEMA Show

Las Vegas Convention Center. The 2025 show ran November 4 to 7 with more than 2,300 exhibiting brands and approximately 160,000 attendees from 140 countries, taking over the entire convention center.

AAPEX

Split across the Venetian Expo and Caesars Forum. The 2025 edition ran November 4 to 6 with more than 2,700 global exhibitors and 5,500 booths across three main halls between the two venues, covering more than 1,400 product categories. It overlaps with SEMA in the same week at different venues, so aftermarket teams often need coverage in two buildings at once.

MAGIC Las Vegas

LVCC West, Central and South Halls, run by Informa. August 10 to 12, 2026, with more than 2,600 exhibiting brands from more than 45 countries. The umbrella covers MAGIC, MAGIC MENS, SOURCING at MAGIC and the Off-Price Show.

World of Concrete

Las Vegas Convention Center, run by Informa. The 2026 edition ran January 20 to 22 with education starting January 19, using the North, Central and South Halls indoors plus the Silver and Bronze Lots outdoors. The 2025 edition drew nearly 58,000 registered professionals and over 1,500 exhibitors across more than three-quarters of a million square feet of exhibit space.

HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition

Venetian Convention & Expo Center, 201 Sands Avenue. HIMSS26 runs March 9 to 12, 2026 in a single-venue format that is new for 2026, with exhibition floor hours March 10 to 12.

SHOT Show

Venetian Expo and Caesars Forum. Its organizer describes it as the biggest event staged at those two venues, which puts the same two-building planning problem in front of exhibitors that AAPEX does.

Show floor access, credentialing and vendor rules are set by the venue and by show management, and they differ from one building and one show to the next. We treat that as part of the booking rather than something to discover on the morning of move-in: once a show and venue are named, the right questions go to show management early, the answers get written down, and the shoot plan is built around whatever they say. If your show team already has a contact for exhibitor services or floor operations, that contact is the fastest route. We will work to whatever that office requires.

Buildings and campuses in this market

  • Las Vegas Convention Center, 3150 Paradise Road, unincorporated Clark County
  • The Venetian Expo, 201 Sands Avenue, Paradise
  • Mandalay Bay Convention Center, south end of the resort corridor
  • CAESARS FORUM, 550,000 square feet of ballroom-led conference space
  • MGM Grand Conference Center and its Marquee Ballroom
  • Wynn Las Vegas and Encore meeting space
  • ARIA East Convention Center, overlooking The Park and T-Mobile Arena
  • The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, 3708 Las Vegas Boulevard South
  • Resorts World Las Vegas, first resort on the Vegas Loop
  • Allegiant Stadium, Paradise, west of Interstate 15
  • Sphere, Paradise, east of the Las Vegas Strip
  • Las Vegas Festival Grounds, 311 West Sahara Avenue
Bearded man in a dark suit and pale tie, photographed at a conference headshot booth
Man in glasses with a close beard and grey suit, photographed at a conference headshot booth
Man in a dark suit and light shirt, photographed at a conference headshot booth
Woman with long blonde hair in a black top, photographed at a conference headshot booth
Older man in a dark suit and patterned tie, photographed at a conference headshot booth
Woman in round glasses with a dark bob, photographed at a conference headshot booth

Sample work from client sessions elsewhere. A Las Vegas program is photographed to this same standard, by the same photographer.

Getting the place right

The shorthand that matters on a show week is about buildings rather than neighborhoods. Halls are named and not numbered, North, Central, South and West at the convention center, so a booth number with no hall name attached is not yet an address anyone can walk to. The Venetian Expo was Sands Expo until 2021, and older show kits and internal documents still say Sands, which sends the occasional crew looking for a building under a name it no longer carries. The LVCVA owns and operates the convention center campus, so the venue and show management are two separate offices, and an answer from one is not an answer from the other. The Loop is the Boring Company tunnel system under that campus, opened June 2021, with Tesla vehicles and human drivers carrying passengers point to point between stations at the LVCC, Resorts World, Encore and Westgate; it is useful for moving a person across the campus between sessions, and we plan case movement through the docks regardless.

We are a St. Louis company. There is no Las Vegas office, no local phone number and no local subcontractor, and that is deliberate. The photographer who shoots your headquarters is the photographer who gets on the plane, so the booth portraits and the office headshots come from the same hands and the same lighting approach. Travel and gear logistics are planned around the show schedule, including move-in, floor hours and teardown, and we build in time on the ground before doors open. Reach out and we will reply within one business day.

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Las Vegas questions

What teams in this market usually ask first.

Who owns the show floor rules, credentials and vendor paperwork?
We own it. Credentialing, floor access and vendor requirements are ours to chase and ours to keep track of, and the work starts the moment a show and a hall are named rather than on the morning of move-in. The honest caveat is that those requirements vary by venue and by show management, so nothing gets assumed in advance: we ask early, write down what comes back, and build the shoot plan around it. If your show team already has a contact in exhibitor services or floor operations, that shortens the loop considerably. Either way it is settled before move-in, because a crew sorting this out at the door is a crew not shooting.
Can you photograph both our booth and our conference sessions?
Both, planned as one schedule, because they want opposite conditions. Booth coverage needs the aisles populated, which means peak floor hours, while sessions and keynotes run on the program's clock in rooms with their own lighting. We map the two against each other before the trip so the day is not a series of conflicts, and we sequence the schedule early instead of promising to be in two halls at once.
Can you run a headshot booth at our stand?
Yes. A headshot setup inside or beside a booth works well and draws traffic on its own. It needs a footprint, power and a position where a backdrop will not block an aisle, so the specifics come out of your booth plan and the venue's rules. We keep a running queue and agree the delivery schedule before the trip, so attendees know when their portrait will arrive and the booth never has to slow down to edit.
Can you shoot photo and video on the same visit?
Most show trips involve both, because the recap video and the still library come from the same three days. Video changes the staffing and the schedule more than people expect, particularly for interviews, which need a quieter space than a show floor provides. Raise it early and we will build the plan around it instead of bolting it on.
We have people in Las Vegas offices. Can you do headshots on the same trip?
That is one of the better reasons to use a traveling photographer. If your team is already in town for a show, or you have staff in the valley year round, we add an office or hotel session to the same trip and shoot it against the same background and lighting standard as the show portraits. Tell us the headcount and we will tell you how many hours it needs.
Another photographer set the look we use. Can you match it?
Send examples before the trip. We reverse engineer the lighting, crop, background and retouching, then shoot a test set and show it to you for approval before the day. Matching an established standard is a normal request from a company with a team page already built, and it is easier to solve in advance than to repair in post.
How far ahead should we book?
Earlier than you would for an office shoot. The Las Vegas calendar is dense and predictable: CES in January, World of Concrete the same month, CONEXPO in March on its three year cycle, NAB in April, MAGIC in August, SEMA and AAPEX in the same November week. Travel and booking availability around those dates tighten well in advance, so we ask for as much notice as you can give. Get in touch and we will reply within one business day.
Can we get selects while the show is still open?
Not as a standing promise, and we would rather say that plainly than sell a turnaround the show schedule cannot hold. What we do is agree before the trip which deliverables are date-bound, a recap post, a press request, a keynote frame, and plan the shooting day so those frames are culled first. Proofs come back with fast turnaround and the full edit follows after teardown, so tell us what has a deadline and we build the day around it.
SEMA and AAPEX run the same week in different buildings. Can you cover both?
Yes, with the schedule settled up front. SEMA takes over the entire Las Vegas Convention Center while AAPEX splits the Venetian Expo and Caesars Forum, which is three buildings across two venues in one week, and no single photographer is in all of them at once. What one photographer can do is set the standard and hold it, with identical lighting, backgrounds and retouching across every hall, so the files come back as one library rather than three. We will tell you plainly how the days are sequenced so each building gets covered one at a time.

Working in Las Vegas?

Tell me the headcount, the offices and the dates. A proposal follows a short conversation, and questions are answered within one business day.

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