This was the fifth straight Cave Creek Rodeo I’ve photographed. There is something about rodeos that I really enjoy attending and photographing. It’s the cowboys and cowgirls. It’s the volunteers who work so hard at this… believe me, it takes a ton of folks to pull this off. It’s the rodeo clowns and the judges and the fans that ask for it all.
The Cave Creek arena is about perfect for me. For the best angles and to stay out of the way of fans in back of me, I waaaay back in the last row. It’s a much smaller arena than the Tucson Rodeo uses. I like that. It’s easy to get to, easy to park, everything is right there. Plenty of beer and hot dogs so I was happy.
A smaller arena meant I could get away with using a smaller lighter lens. For the second half of the rodeo, I used a Tamron 28-300mm. For the first half, I used a beast of a lens, the Tamron 150-600mm hand held. Yes, hand held. It’s designed to be used on a tripod or monopod. I made it though.!
Given we were in bright sunlight, I shot mostly at ISO 100 and tried to keep the shutter to about 1/800 to 1/1000 of a second.
The feature of every rodeo seems to be the last event, bull riding. Now I do love eight seconds of hell on top of such a beast, but the ladies event, the barrel racing, might be my all time favorite. Wow, they were good. One young lady looked to be competitive, but knocked down two barrels so the penalty seconds took her out of the money.
Until My Next Adventure,
(Country Thunder!)
See You On Down The Road!
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