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I had to do a collage into a single photo to tell this story. Calf roping is just part of the every day cowboys job here in the FL rough lands. Thousands of head of calves roam with their mothers in places where you only get to on horse back. Most people hear FL and think of beaches. We have cattle ranches measured in sections or square miles instead of acres. This is what is taking place at this event. This is team roping. Cowboys who really get good at it win Dodge pickups as prizes. The first rider lassos the horns. Notice the head wrap on the steer. Those are protective gear to protect the calf from the lariat. Once the head end of the calf is secure the second rider throws his lariat for a trap to catch the rear legs. At this point the event is finished. The calf is not thrown down or anything else but quickly released. The cowboys are working against the clock to determine skill level. This is one of the toughest events in the rodeo and the hardest to photograph due to the separation of the cowboys distance wise and it happens very quick. These calves are not the normal beef stock seen on ranches but Corriente specially bred for this event. There are far more misses than catches. In the wilds they work til they catch but in the rodeo they get just one chance. These horse also bred for this kind of work. The have a sense as to watch the calf and do their part automatically with out the rider having to make every decision. As far as the photography goes this is in the dark end of the arena and before the days of high ISO cameras.
In Santa Monica, there's a cemetery they leave open all night, for whatever reason. I was driving by last night and had my camera, so I figured hey, why not...
I got maybe a dozen pictures, and was messing with focus (hard to nail down when your subject shows as pitch black in the viewfinder) and aperture/shutter speed settings, when all of a sudden, there's this horrible snarling sound coming from beneath me and something shoots up my pantleg.
I jump a couple feet in the air and drop the f-bomb loud enough to wake the local residents.
The sprinkler I was standing on was set to go off at 12.30am, evidently
I spent the last two nights at the LAS observatory. Unfortunately, the cloud gods didn't get the memo that those nights were supposed to feature near perfect weather conditions. I had anticipated going deep on a number of interesting objects, but only managed to get 40 minutes of data on Messier 45, the Pleiades, in Taurus, and 18 minutes, 36 seconds on IC-5070, the Pelican Nebula, in Cygnus, and a few minutes on some other objects before the clouds ended my session, BOTH NIGHTS. Surprisingly, the data I did manage was of high quality. Anyway, Here is my effort on IC-5070, as grainy as it is, it came out much better than I expected:
I will post Messier 45 tomorrow.
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