Parada Del Sol Rodeo Scottsdale 12 March 2017

This is one of my favorite rodeos, commonly called the Scottsdale Rodeo.  The venue is Westworld, an indoor arena, so at least no worries of a sunburn on this sunny Sunday in March.  Plus, it was air conditioned.

On the negative side, for photographers, was the mixed natural and fluorescent lighting.   And, that type of lighting always looks bright to the naked eye, but for the camera it isn't.  I had to compromise between shutter speed and the needed high ISO.  I was around 2500 ISO and a shutter speed from 1/160th to 1/200th of a second.  And the f/stop was as wide open as I could get.  So... I had to watch for grain in photos and maybe some unwanted motion blur.  I shot with a Canon 5D Mark IV and a Tamron 28-300mm lens.

We got to the arena quite early and was delighted to see a pre-event, ladies and gentlemen horseback target shooting.  The shooting made for a smokey arena, but this was fun to watch and it seemed to me the ladies did an overall better job of it!

What would a rodeo be without clowns?  I've always thought the clowns were some of the hardest working people in rodeo.  They are there to entertain but also distract angry animals away from cowboys.    

The ladies of rodeo put on what I consider to be my second favorite event:  barrel racing.  Now, this is a sad sight.  A barrel that goes down costs 5 seconds on the total time.  This young lady knocked down two this day so she was out of the running

This fellow rounds up buffalo and gets them on top of that trailer.  Magnificent creatures!

Probably not a good idea to play "horsey" with these big animals either!

Until My Next Adventure, 

See You On Down the Road!

Jim Patterson

Photos from Flickr ... and, here are all the keeper photos!