Shooting Cowboys and Cacti in the Arizona Desert

What goes on inside my head during a shoot? A few people have asked me that question, so I thought I would share my experience while trying out the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark III for the very first time.

Recently, I posted a few shots on Facebook from a trip to the Tanque Verde Ranch just outside of Tucson, Arizona. A lot of folks had questions about how I approached these shots – especially since I usually shoot in the studio – so I thought this would be a great opportunity to walk you through every aspect of how the images came to be.

So let’s begin the brain dump . . .

The scenario

My reason for visiting this very cool dude ranch, situated on the edge of Saguaro National Park and the Coronado National Forest, was to attend this year’s Olympus Visionary Summit. The summit is an event where Olympus brings all of the Visionary team together for a few days of meetings, education, team building, and of course, shooting. This was my first summit, and honestly, I was like a kid in a candy shop having the opportunity to hang out with 10 world-class photographers for a few days. My goal was to spend time with folks who shot genres other than my own to see how they approach their craft.

We all arrived in Tucson on Monday and attended meetings both Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. Each afternoon, after lunch was reserved for shooting opportunities. We weren’t told what they were until a few minutes before they began.

Our coordinator at Olympus gave us a gear list of suggested items to bring, and we were also encouraged to bring any other gear that we desired.

Overall, I planned to have fun. Given that I’m primarily a studio shooter, I had no expectations of creating portfolio images.

Tuesday Shooting

Tuesday afternoon, we were given free time to shoot, so I asked two great landscape photographers, Peter Baumgarten and Frank Smith, if I could tag along with them since they had decided to hike and shoot in the desert.

I left my backpack at the ranch and took both camera bodies with the 7-14, the 12-100, and the 60mm Macro, along with some spare batteries. I had the E-M1X with the 7-14 on an Olympus barbershop sling strap and the E-M5 Mark III on a Peak Design Capture Clip and Pro Pad on my belt. I wore an oversized coat with large pockets to hold the extra pieces. I also wore a vest and a baseball cap because it was the coldest week of the year so far in Tucson, so the desert wasn’t that warm, even during the day.

In preparation for the trip, I visited the ranch’s website several times, so I had a basic idea of what I might see before I arrived.

We headed out from the ranch into the foothills and began on a path that took us up and down over several cactus-filled ridges. If you’ve never seen them, the Saguaro cacti are incredibly tall and majestic. Our hike began around 1:30 pm, which meant the sun was high in the cloudless sky, and since it was winter, the vegetation was really lacking color. In other words, it was a very gray landscape with harsh light.

Being a city boy, I will admit that I had to pay extra attention to the many loose rocks that we were hiking over as we went up and down the ridges, and there was the nagging concern about the hundreds of holes that I saw, which could have been from small rodents or currently occupied by snakes.

The most colorful aspect of the scenery in front of me was the blue sky, and the most striking aspect was, of course, the cacti. So I took two different approaches to shooting these scenes. I looked for spots where the cacti were dense and close together. Then, with the sun behind my back, I would shoot low and show the cactus against a deep blue sky. For these shots, I went with short, wide-angle focal lengths and small apertures for a lot of depth of field.

To get as much richness out of the colors as possible, I tended to underexpose slightly. If I were shooting this type of work more often, a polarizer would have been ideal for these shots. But I found comfort in the fact that my fellow shooters weren’t using filters either.

My second approach to the cactus was to shoot directly towards the sun at f/16 with the 7-14mm zoom on the E-M1X, creating starbursts by allowing the sun to peek out from behind the cacti. This also underexposed the blue sky, making the colors much richer.

As the afternoon wore on and we headed back towards the ranch, we realized two alarming facts…. None of us had thought to bring water into the desert, and while we had a general sense of where the ranch was, we couldn’t find our way back into the ranch. We needed to be back by 4:30 pm to photograph a release of 180 horses who would then stampede down a hill to where their dinner was waiting.

After failing to find a path back to the ranch, we realized the only way we would make it in time for the release was to climb a few fences and cross a shallow desert wash. So climb we did, and with wet feet, we climbed into the horse arena as people started yelling that we had to get out because the horses were about to be released. So we ran across the arena to a smaller, penned-off area that put us behind the horses, meaning they were all backlit, and we had great shots of their backsides as they went down the hill. All of our other Visionaries who didn’t get lost were on the opposite side of the arena, photographing the horses coming down the hill with front lighting.

Realizing that I didn’t really have a shot, I picked up the E-M5 Mark III with the 12-100mm just as I saw a white horse walk away from the pack about 50 feet in front of us. It still wasn’t much of a photo, but at least I wasn’t looking at the horse’s backside. He milled about for a few seconds and then turned and started bucking like crazy for about 10 seconds. That was all I needed. I managed to shoot four frames. 4 single shots because I had been using the camera in the desert and hadn’t reset the frame rate to high speed.

The moral here is that there is always a shot. Back in my newspaper days, I couldn’t come back to the newsroom and say that I missed the shot. That was never an option. Sometimes you can’t get the optimal shot so you look for something else. In this case, I had a bad angle, the wrong lenses, and I noticed one horse doing something different – so I followed him and reacted when he decided to have some fun.

So for day one, I came away with some very average shots of cactus in the desert and a nice action shot of a bucking horse. Honestly, my two favorite shots from the day were of my fellow visionary, Peter Baumgarten, and Frank Smith – mainly because these two images represent the experience that I had with both of them.

Wednesday Shooting

For the second afternoon, we had three arranged shooting opportunities. This is a shot that I made of Marty who is one of the cowboys on the ranch. He was actually posing for fellow Visionary Scott Bourne while we were waiting for our rides, but I liked the feel of the desert and other ranch hands in the background, so I grabbed three frames. This shot was extremely backlit, so I imagined a great black-and-white shot and exposed for the shadows.

By this time, we had been told that we would be shooting action for the afternoon, but I had decided that the E-M5 Mark III was going to be my go-to camera for the day – mainly as a way to challenge myself without the higher frame rates of the E-M1X. It’s been a long time since I’ve shot sports, so I thought the challenge would be fun and hopefully a way to prove to a few more people that you don’t need high frame rates to take great action shots.

I was still working out of the jacket with both camera bodies, the 7-14, the 12-100, and this afternoon I also brought along the 45 and the 40-150.

Our first shooting opportunity was to photograph four ranch hands on horseback in a small arena, along with some cattle. This was mid-afternoon, so there was some cross-lighting, but overall the lighting remained very harsh. I started with the M.Zuiko 300mm F4 IS PRO lens that I borrowed from fellow Visionary Alex McClure. I wasn’t really excited by the surroundings in the arena – the light was flat with the sun behind me, and there were 14 other people with cameras wandering around the arena, and I didn’t want them in my shot – so I thought I would go with tight action shots to show some personality with the riders and the 300mm made that possible.

To make matters a bit more challenging, the cattle weren’t very active and just walking or barely jogging, so there wasn’t much happening that was interesting until they moved the cattle into a pen.

The challenge now was that all four riders – three women and one guy were wearing cowboy hats and oversized sunglasses, so there were no eyes to be seen – and yes – even when shooting sports or events – it’s all about the eyes. So I started looking for other bits of personality or body language to help make a shot. Most of the riders had dark hair and wore serious expressions. One of the female riders was blonde, and while she looked more like a Colorado skier, she was full of personality and clearly having fun, so she became my primary subject.

I still wasn’t digging the flat light, so I decided to move to the other side of the arena and shoot towards the sun, which would leave my subjects backlit. In a situation like this – I know that I need to expose for the shadows – because the riders and the horses faces are in shadow and I know that is going to blow out the sky – so as I was moving to the other side of the arena – I decided to shoot this series in black and white and switched my E-M5 Mark III over to Monochrome with the contrast at +2 so that I could see the images as black and white in the electronic viewfinder. The +2 on the contrast setting gives the preview image a real film feel. I am, of course, shooting in RAW, so I still have the color image and will process it as black and white using Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 from DxO.

Eventually, the blonde rider started playing tag on horseback with the male rider – that’s when I was able to get these shots of them chasing each other and moving in random directions with quick stops and turns.

I also had to pay close attention to the backgrounds, as I found the structures very distracting, along with the other people shooting.

This is also a good time to point out that, for the most part, these shots are cropped in camera. Here are the finished images next to the straight-out-of-the-camera image. I don’t care if you are shooting with 20 megapixels like I was or if you have a hundred megapixels – you do your composition in camera – even when it’s random, fast-moving action. This is why you practice. You don’t shoot with your subject filling one-third of your frame and then crop later. That is simply wasting megapixels, which means that you are wasting money and image quality.

I’ve been asked how I handled focusing with all of the action, and the truth is I let the camera do the work – BUT – that also means that I understood the camera’s capabilities and used them to my advantage. My focus settings were Continuous Autofocus with Tracking. NO – I didn’t use back-button focus; I used the shutter release. When you have subjects moving so randomly, and even heading straight towards you, back-button focus is not a good idea.

The camera’s shutter release will get the job done much more efficiently and effectively than you, as a human, will. I also used the high-speed shutter setting on the E-M5 Mark III, which can shoot up to 10 frames per second. I didn’t just lie on the button and make 10 frames-per-second movies. I would always anticipate the action and then tap the shutter quickly, which would give me 1 or 2 frames. If the subject were coming toward me, I would repeat that over and over, never leaving my finger on the shutter release so that I wasn’t keeping the autofocus active. The camera is quick enough, with its 121 cross-type autofocus points, to grab focus immediately when I press the shutter. Remember – these shots were done in bright sunlight, so the camera had no problem locking focus, even in backlit situations.

The second shooting opportunity of the afternoon was to photograph three riders walking their horses along a shallow creek bed. By now, the sun was beginning to lower in the sky, and the light was getting slightly warmer in color. Just like in the arena, we had to make lighting choices. If we had the riders move to our east, we had a more picturesque view, but with really boring light and not a lot of color. So, as a group, we agreed to have the riders move to our west and shoot them backlit as they walked the horses towards us.

Again, I exposed for the shadows because I was most interested in the riders’ and horses’ faces. As the sun was getting lower in the sky, the male rider finally took off his sunglasses and asked us if we would like to get some shots with his horse in a gallop. It isn’t safe for the horses to gallop in the creek bed, but he had found a spot that was very smooth, so we had a short stretch where he could give the horse a little “giddyup” and create some action with splashing water. For me, the key was to get a moment where he lifted his head just enough to get his face. Like the shots in the arena – I did short bursts and let the camera handle the focusing.

I varied my camera angles, switching from wide-angle to telephoto on the 12-100mm zoom to change perspectives. I stuck with the 12-100 all afternoon – honestly, because I had completely forgotten that I had the 40-150 in my jacket pocket. It actually made my job easier not to have to think about lenses and accessories as much. The 12-100 is a 24-200mm full-frame equivalent, and with a range like that, it is easy to forget that other focal lengths are available.

As we were wrapping up at this location and the sun was getting lower, I was able to make this silhouette shot of a rider using the f/16 technique that I described earlier.

Before we returned to the ranch, we made one last stop along the top of a ridge as the sun was setting, and I was able to grab these two shots for a nice finish to my afternoon. Just like my other cactus shots, I wanted color and for the cacti to look majestic. The most challenging part of this shot was waiting for the sun to reach the perfect spot on the horizon. In my studio, the light responds when and how I want it to.

All of the images – both days – were shot on Manual exposure.

Wrap-up

So there you have it. I am not going to win any awards for these photos, and they are not gonna be published in National Geographic, but I am proud of them. I am proud of them because 47 years after I purchased my first camera, it was the basics of photography and understanding my gear that provided the foundation for these shots. It was those 47 years of experience that gave me the references to help solve the problems that I encountered. I am proud of them because they will forever serve as a memory of the two days I spent in the Arizona desert with 10 of the most amazing photographers the world has to offer, and whom I can now call my friends.

Photography is not a competition – it is a passion to be shared.

I hope you found this information useful. Now go pick up that camera and shoot something! Because – “Your BEST shot is your NEXT shot!” — Joe Edelman

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