Get back on your Horse

Next time you visit your local rodeo, make sure you take the camera! So many possibilities for photo exploration it's insane. Simply strap on a tight pair of wranglers with a nice belt buckle and head on out to see what you can find.

For this weeks personal shoot, I headed out with one camera body and a couple of lenses (fyi - don't leave your long glass at home). I ended up shooting most of the action with a 70-200mm and 1.4 TC. which gave me a fair amount of flexibility from where we were sitting. The rodeo started rather late (8pm), so I had to plan for high ISO if I wanted to stop the action at all. At least that's how my thought pattern started out...but it's usually at this point that I have a small epiphany and think to myself, "I wonder how it really feels to be a cowboy...man vs. beast...jumping on a bull ready to buck you off with the risk of all 2,000 pounds of weight landing on you. Or how about roping a cattle or wrestling a running steer to the ground as you abandon a perfectly good horse at about 30 mph?" That's what happened as it does often when shooting and I decided to leave the ISO around 200 or so and work on creating movement and emotion in the shots through a series of panning techniques and low shutter speeds.

Slow shutter starts now...




I would usually trash this shot due to lots of out of focus areas, but I love the story it tells with the white sock.