The West is still here. You just have to know where to look.
Shooting the West started with a camera and a simple idea: photograph the American West as it actually exists.
Not as a costume. Not as nostalgia. Not as some polished version of what it's supposed to look like.
The real thing.
Rodeo arenas. Horses and the people who live around them. Back roads and fairgrounds. Dust hanging in hard light. Smoke. Steel. Leather. Small towns. Big country. People doing things they've done their entire lives, and people doing them for the first time.
Sometimes it's loud. Sometimes absolutely nothing is happening.
Both are worth photographing.
THE PHOTOGRAPHS
I'm not particularly interested in making everything look perfect.
A technically perfect photograph can still be boring as hell.
I'd rather find the frame that feels like standing there — the dirt in the air, the movement, the expression nobody was posing for, or the fraction of a second when everything comes together before disappearing again.
That's what I'm looking for when I'm behind the camera.
Some of those photographs will end up in The Stories. Some will be made for the people who were there. Others will probably sit on a hard drive until I realize six months later that I love them.
That's part of it.
FIELD NOTES
This is the part where the photographs get some words.
Field Notes will be stories from the road, events I've covered, people I've met, places worth remembering, photographs that deserve a little more context, and occasionally whatever was going through my head when I pressed the shutter.
Think less photography blog and more notebook from the field.
There will be rodeos here, certainly.
But the West is bigger than rodeo.
It's people, animals, machines, landscapes, traditions, communities, and all the strange little moments happening between the things everyone else came to see.
The West is home base, not a fence.
COME ALONG FOR THE RIDE
I don't know exactly where Shooting the West goes from here.
That's kind of the point.
There are stories I already know I want to photograph and plenty I haven't found yet. There are roads I haven't driven, people I haven't met, and photographs I couldn't plan if I tried.
So this is the beginning.
Welcome to Shooting the West.
Let's see what's out there.