Bill Leyden's Blog

Local volunteers help their neighbors to live independently.  Here Arlene spends some time with Gladys, who doesn’t see as well as she used to catch up on local and national news.

2010 Whiskey Row Marathon, AZ

While driving on Gurley St., in Prescott AZ, I noticed a throng a couple of streets over.  Luckily I had my Canon 5D with me.

I pulled over when I saw the cones curve onto Gurley and waited.  I love this image; at this point in Whiskey Row Marathon, I guess the participants are ‘all smiles.’

At the last minute, I decided to take a couple of extra flash units, a head light and a cart to photograph Wolfs Robe at Montezuma’s Castle in central Arizona. Although he said it might be dark and that no one had successfully shot a performance and captured the Indian ruins far in the background, I didn’t think that he meant, “Bill, it is going to be black out there!”

I loaded the cart and rolled 1/4 mile to the mini amphitheater and started to assess the situation. I decided to use every flash that I had brought with me. First, I set up two powerful flashes to light the ruins several hundred feet in the background: a Quantum and a Metz at what I hoped would be F5.6 (no metering here as the ruins are closed to the public. Then I set up two flashes on Wolf: a Canon 580 EX on a Pocketwizard flex TT5 with through-the-lens metering, and a second flash, the revered Vivitar 285 to his right and to the rear at 1/16 power. On the camera, I trigger the whole show with a Pocketwizard Flex TT1, 1/80 sec at F5.6.

The results out-of-the camera are shown below:

The head light? I used it to retrieve the two flashes that were 30 feet off the trail in the dark when the show was over.

Wolfs Robe can’t help playing no matter what the weather condition!

Los Angeles-based writer/director steps under an arcade for me to get this study. Look for his feature Painting in the Rain, now in post-production.

I am always interested to see what this mother/daughter team will want to do for their annual portrait. This year we visited a botanical garden near Palos Verdes, CA. I ran for shade, as the sun was stark this day.

Cristal is at the age where she would rather be texting, and did so during every break; I just kept shooting!

For mother/daughter shots.

The end of the day of the end of the weekend.

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I returned to Sedona to photograph Wolfs Robe.  We ended up driving to the south rim of the Grand Canyon to make some images.  I love this one:

The clouds started to darken and then the clouds burst.  But we kept shooting in the rain.

Luckily the equipment and Wolfs Robe survived the cloudburst and we got some additional great images.