4th of July party in Oak Creek Canyon

On Saturday Julie, Reagan and I drove up to the canyon to join my guitar player, Al, for a two-band jam in a neighborhood near the top of the canyon. His brother has a cabin in Pine Flats and the neighbors throw a huge party every year. Al's brother has a band called Young Country and we didn't really have a name so we went with The Dagwoods. We figured out our set list on the fly and did some classic rock and r&b tunes while they did country and some rock, too. It was the most fun I've ever had on a 4th of July. I decided to leave the camera in the car but one of Al's friends had just bought a Nikon D300 just like mine and didn't know how to use it. I couldn't resist and showed her a few cool features like how it shoots so well without flash; I took these just using stage lights. Sure was a lot of blue!






After that I showed her how to "drag the shutter." It's a cool trick using the flash with a camera setting called "rear curtain sync." I set the camera to manual on a 1 full second shutter speed which will make a really blurry image. Then the flash fires just before the shutter closes which lights the subject and "freezes" them so they are sharper among these blurry lines. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't; takes some practice to get the technique right. I forgot to show her double exposures but I'll show some in the next blog from my Las Vegas job I'm on.