Sheri with an "Eye": Rodeo Days

A fun place to practice action photography is at a rodeo. I had never been to one before and so just seeing a rodeo in person sounded fun and then I was going to get to photograph it. One of my photography clubs was going to take an overnighter to check it out. We had a professional rodeo photographer come and talk to us. He told us what events we would be seeing and what to look for and what was that good shot that you would want to try and get. Well, for my first time I am pretty happy. It was a fun event and we had plenty of opportunity to try to get pictures of the bucking bronchos, calf wrestling, bucking bulls, calf roping and barrel races, plus the clowns.

I used my 100-400 mm zoom lens which worked just fine. I kept my shutter speed at 1/1000 of a second and started at the lowest ISO I could. When the lighting was good, I was at ISO 400. As the sun started going down I went up to as high as 1600. Then I started to use my flash with my Better Beamer flash extender. That is when I had to start being a little careful about timing my shots as I couldn't do a burst of shots and have them come out. For the rodeo in the evening we had reserved seating in the stands where we had to stay put. Some of us went to the top of the stands so we could take shots and not get the fence in our pictures most of the time. We had special permission to photograph with tripods the following morning and could roam around the ring (just outside the fence of course) and photograph were we wanted. There were a few people there in the morning watching the events, but mostly we had the area to ourselves. For myself, I found it was easiest to track the action hand holding my camera with image stabilization on. The lighting was good and so I could shoot 1/1000 of a second at ISO 400 and get f8-11.

Here are some of my shots: