Yesterday I shot my last rodeo for the year, and as always, I am in awe of the cowboys and cowgirls that participate in the events.

Roping, barrel racing, steer wrestling, bull riding or bronc riding, never let anyone tell you that these folks are not athletes. The livestock like this bull has been bred to be the best bull it can be in the ring. The power and agility of these huge beasts is amazing as well.

In this event, the rider needs to stay on the bull for eight seconds in order to obtain a score. I would bet this would be the longest eight seconds of my life. Not that I could even last two :)

The gentleman on the left in the white shirt is a bullfighter. Their job is to keep the rider safe once he is off the bull, This usually entails stepping between the rider who is often on the ground, and an awfully angry bull. The riders rely heavily on the bullfighters for there is always that moment where the rider, especially if thrown off the bull, is vulnerable to getting hurt.

Enjoy the ride!

When my father passed almost 25 years ago, some of the keepsakes he had was a photo album and thousands of color slides that he shot over many decades. He was a good photographer but because he had to raise a family, photographed a lot of boring, cookie-cutter events that he would sell to the local paper if he was lucky. He also shot weddings and bar-mitzvahs. Those all saw the scrap heap without ever being viewed. What was left was friends, family and memories.

I once tortured my wife and made her sit through a viewing of the slides. I had set up the screen, turned on my dad's old projector and loaded them up. In all honesty, there wasn't enough wine in the house, or maybe the whole city, to get through all of them. But there were these shining moments within the 1000s of fairly mundane slides. Family long since passed, friends, and memories of some sort of event, be it a road trip or just a trip to get ice cream in our old jalopy Ford station wagon.

I paw through the photo album occasionally, probably when I am missing him, and the photos never fail to bring forth some sort of response or emotion from me. All black and white, almost all of them before I came along. It's a time machine of sorts.

In the last 12 months I shot over 10,000 photos. I know people that shoot many more than that as well. They're in digital format obviously because except for the occasional film enthusiast, everyone shoots in digital now. There's a lot of warmth, feeling, and even charm to shooting film, but just like CDs replacing vinyl, digital photography has replaced film for all practical matters.

So what are we going to hand down to our children and grandchildren? Our nieces and nephews?

Most people are one hard-drive or smart phone failure away from losing every photo they have ever taken. History being wiped out in an instant, never to be recovered. 

I have a photo of my dad from 1930. He was five years old. It's really frayed, the paper yellowed, but it's him from 84 years ago. How many five year-olds that have their picture taken today will be able to leave that for their children in 84 years? I would bet that number would be in the 1/100ths of 1% at best.

I have no solution for our short-term hold on history. Maybe take a CD down to your local Walmart once a month and get cheap prints made or do like I, and many photographers do and not only vault your photos but back them up locally as well as to an offsite backup company?

It'll be a shame when the decades are erased by technology.

A couple of months ago I spent quite a bit of time going through my work from three and four years ago. Some of the images I was still quite happy with, but others I see where I could have done better. Sometimes it was composition, or lighting, or post-processing, other times it was the subject or the circumstance, or as hard as it is to admit, my technical ability that wasn't quite right. This forced me to pare down my galleries and be more honest with myself as to what images I want on someone's wall as an example of my work. I think this type of introspection is a good thing in general.

Of the wildlife images that I felt I could have done better, I can only look forward to my next encounter. There's no do overs with wildlife. Of my landscape work, many will never be even close to repeatable unless I figure out how to manipulate weather and the seasons, but I did realize I could at least go back to the same location and make another attempt.

This is Devil Canyon in Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area on the Montana/Wyoming border. The first time I was at this spot the month was September, close to sundown and I took what I thought was a real nice image of the canyon. I still like the image and left it in my gallery, but when the opportunity came to re-shoot the canyon, I had to try it again. Only this time it was in early May.

Instead of sparkling blue-green water of the Shoshone, it was brown from the winter runoff. Instead of waiting for the "Golden Hour" before and after sundown, it was early afternoon. But I wasn't leaving without some images, good or bad.

The last time I was at this spot, I took the image hand-held in relatively low light. I picked the best of the shots from that day and processed it until I was satisfied, and like I said, I still like the image. But this time I set my gear up on a tripod, used a remote shutter to minimize any chance of camera shake and fired off about 50 frames while changing focal length, exposure, and focal points. I already knew how I was going to put this image together to get the end result I wanted.

In post-processing I picked five images that varied only by exposure and focal point and blended them together to give you the image you see above. The five images revealed what the shadows were hiding on the left side of the canyon walls and allowed the background to be almost as sharp as the foreground giving a lot of depth to the canyon.

Do I wish I had done this technique the first time I was here? Sure, at least the tripod part. Will I look back at this image in X years and roll my eyes at all the technical stuff that could have been better? I may.

But for now, I'm thrilled with the opportunity to retrace my steps once in a while and see if I can outdo myself.

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