A shooting shoot

The Turkey Creek Regulators held a shooting competition today at Cross Sabers by West Point.  I obviously had to go so I could get pictures of people barreling around on horseback.  It was windy, windy! The balloons were whipping around and I have no idea how anybody hit any of the balloons, I miss a lot of the shooting when I take pictures because I see everything through the camera, and I don’t pay attention to what is actually going on.  I might want to mention here that the Regulators are a mounted shooting club in Nebraska that belong to the national group Cowboy Mounted Shooters Association.  The CMAS has clubs all over the United States.  I am only familiar with the Regulators mainly because they are nearby, although I did get some pictures of the Iowa club in April.  There are balloons on sticks the riders have to shoot out, they’re set out in different patterns, and the whole thing is timed. If you miss a balloon they add 5 seconds, and if you knock over a barrel there’s penalty, too.  They have different levels, so if you have a very slow horse like I do that is scared to death of his shadow, let alone a balloon boinking around in the wind, you aren’t running against some of these guys that go tearing around like maniacs (I LOVE those riders! They have the best hoofies-off-the-ground photos).  Anyway, today it was windy and sometimes it was very cloudy.  I had really lousy dark pictures but very lucky for me I have photoshop, and I can fix any crappy pictures I take.  The ‘sun was out’ pictures turned out really well, although depending on the shirt color, it’s hard to adjust and not blend a light shirt right out into the sky, and stuff like that. Well, I’m hardly a photographer or a photoshop expert, and that I get pictures that look like someone shooting at something, or just charging around at a dead run, I am happy.  I had my 100-300 zoom lens so when they rode close, I got some good portrait-type pictures. I am not sure what I’ll do with them yet, I am taking a portrait class next month from a western artist (how fortuitous) so I will see.  By and large it was a productive day, my eyeballs are burning from all the dirt and wind irritation, and I’m sure if there aren’t tornadoes running rampant tomorrow, I’ll go back again.

 

The Iowa Cowboy Mounted Shooters

The Cowboy Mounted Shooters Association is a national club, and there’s state clubs all over the country. I don’t know if each state has one, or ten or whatever, but anyway I stumbled across the Iowa group at the Iowa horse fair in Des Moines last weekend.  The group I show artwork with, Equine Fine Arts, needed a scouting party to see if the Iowa horse fair might be a place to set up shop next year.  Since I was not doing anything else I volunteered myself to go. It’s a 3  hour drive to Des Moines, and I felt as though I’d end up talking to a few vendors and then going home. Well, there were a lot of horses there.  I saw these Spanish vaqueros or whatever they’re called, they were really cool.  A little pony rolled in the grass and got filthy right before the breed parade (they have one of each breed enter the arena) so three people were scraping grass clippings off this pony, who was wondering why he couldn’t roll and be done with it.  What made me very happy was seeing the list of events, and the mounted shooters were in the east arena. The east arena is at the very very east end of the fairgrounds, and I parked 4 blocks west of the very very east end of the fairgrounds.  There were entire barns full of trailers, a Dodge dealer with about eight trucks sitting out, and the distant ‘bang bang’ of the mounted shooters.  I was very thrilled to have them doing their thing while I was there.  It turned a 20 minute venture into a 3 hour photo shoot.  Someone was thinking of me! I’m sure, I’m positive, the only reason any of those people showed up was so that I could take pictures.  But how did they know I was coming??