PBR Challenge

Last Saturday (Most of) my family went to a Professional Bull Riders competition. It has taken me a week to get all the photos edited, because I took a ton. I think I had almost eight hundred. Of course, I probably deleted at least three hundred, but it still took all week to get through them. I have more than one post planned for here, and then I have a post planned for my photography blog as well. For this post, I‘ll just share the general pictures I took over the course of the evening. There’s no way I’ll be posting them all, but this is to just give you an idea of what all happened.

When we first got there dad wanted his picture taken by a huge semi.


The arena.

Dad’s at the end. Jacob’s friend Josh also came with us.

I saw our Suburban off in the distance, so I attached my zoom lens and took a picture.

This guy’s shirt cracked me up. Any shirts that have designs that would make a PETA person blow steam from their ears usually do. :p

This was cool.

The Bull Riders are all introduced.

The first victim, I mean rider…

They let a bunch of bulls out to charge around the arena at the beginning.

Rodeos, and other western events, are very patriotic. Don’t tell the ACLU, but the announcer even prayed before the show! >GASP!< Scandalous!

She sang the Star Spangled Banner.

Instead of a troop of face painted clowns, they had bull fighters. They basically did the same thing as the clowns would have, distract the bulls to give the riders a chance to escape after they were bucked off.

This was the only face-painted clown. He may have been slightly insane, but he let the bull fighters do all the dangerous work. He just yelled at the bulls from a distance. With a microphone. He was basically there for entertainment, he didn’t do much to protect the riders.

Apparently the crowd to the left wasn’t cheering loud enough.

Surprisingly I got a lot of pretty decent shots. Pretty much all of them were slightly blurry, but that’s to be expected when the bulls were moving so fast.

I would never want to be a clown at a rodeo. I mean bullfighter. I know I’d get trampled by the first bull.

“Jester’s” job was basically the same as a cheerleader’s at a football game. Get the crowd excited. Every once in a while he’s start pointing at sections of the crowd that he wanted to make noise.

I have more pictures of his antics that will come in a future blog.

This is a sequence that shows basically what goes on during a ride.

This is where the bullfighters are crucial. Without them, the rider is as good as dead. The bull would trample and gore him within seconds. I have some pictures that show just how dangerous the job of a rodeo clown/bullfighter is. I have another blog post planned just for that.

The rider escapes by jumping the fence. Could you leap to your feet and instantly race for and climb over a huge fence after being tossed through the air and landing on your face? I couldn’t.

Keep in mind that this all took place in seconds. If I didn’t have a DSLR camera, there’s no way I could have taken this many shots.

After the rider is out, they open that gate behind the bull and he usually runs through. If he doesn’t, the bullfighters harass him until he gets annoyed enough to run through.
Part 2 Coming Soon!