From the Archives - Random Rodeo

This week I was going through some old photo albums of mine and came upon this moment. I thought I would do a little series, picking out some of the photos I was particularly happy about at the time and then analysing them with my current view of photography and even try to guess what camera and film stock I was using.

First off, this was such a great memory for me. It is in southern Alberta and a bunch of my cousins randomly showed up to have a rodeo. I really wish I could remember who was in the barrel. Either way, there were a lot of laughs as we all took a turn either riding the steer or playing the rodeo clown.

Now what do I like about this image? To begin with, the composition. The tilt of the image does a few things; it creates this motion that mirrors the steer. It almost looks like the cow is standing still here but the rider is soon to be pitched forward in the direction of the tilt. It also allows the important parts to be seen; the rider, the people chuckling from the sidelines, the next person in line to ride, and of course the hands of the kid in the barrel!

In thinking if I would do anything differently now, especially in the age of digital cameras, there were some easy immediate things. It is too tilted, straighten it a bit. Where is the contrast? Bump that a bit. I should have stood a little closer. Crop it. I actually got so far as to import the image into Lightroom and did some of these. It did not make the photo better. I'm going to repeat this. It did not make the photo better. It made it worse. Significantly worse.

There has been a trend recently to go back to film photography. And while a roll of Kodak will set you back $25 and then the development is another $25, I can see why people are embracing it. There is a gritty imperfection that, while it can be approximated with digital, the feeling during the process of making an image is the point. For this image I wanted to get the people in the background and the clown in the barrel. I didn't know where the steer was going to end up. The only way I could fill the frame with the story was to turn the camera sideways. The rest was a happy accident...sort of.

Camera: almost certain this was a Minolta XG-1, my first camera.

Film: Likely Ilford 400 something or other. I really don't know.

Year: Probably 2009 or 2010