Past foolish games

bullriding starts early-calf riding-2012

bracing for the fall; calf riding 2012

ride ’em cowboy! calf riding 2012

don’t let go! mutton bustin’ 2012

bareback bronc riding; rodeo 2012

sun going down; hot and dusty like a rodeo ought to be; roping 2012

trying to stay on; bronc riding 2012

hanging on! bronc riding 2012

sun going down, rodeo just heating up; 2012

After posting my photos from this year’s rodeo, I realized I had some from last year I really wanted to share. This too goes under the category of the foolish games we play haha.

Apparently, the desire to ride bulls starts young. Mutton Busting is one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen. Little kids on wily sheep – always good for a few photos. The calf riding was really something also. That’s for a little older kids and I’ll tell ya – some took some pretty hard falls but they seemed to enjoy it. It was definitely fun trying to get those photos.

Then there’s the men and women of rodeo. I didn’t get any women in this bunch and my cameras are too limited to try and get the barrel racing, which is truly amazing, or I’d have some of those too. The riding part is one thing, but getting off of those animals is a whole other story. A clean “exit” if you will, is clearly best, but sometimes a foot gets stuck or the rider gets caught under the animal and then it’s really brutal – as if all the jerking about isn’t hard enough on a body.

This year there was a couple of scary moments with the bulls. I missed on incident where a rider ended up with a broken pelvis (we heard the update from the hospital during the rodeo) and another merely ended up with ripped pants – he had them replaced. The incident with that young man was scary though, as images of “8 Seconds” cross my mind and instantly thought of Lane Frost and getting mauled by a bull. Fortunately that didn’t happen. Oh the foolish things we do for an adrenaline rush and for entertainment.

All of these photos were taken with my Panasonic Lumix. Again it has 18x optical zoom and 10 mega pixels. I can get some pretty good images from that little camera and it does most of my work for me. One day I won’t be such a “lazy” photographer haha.

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