Cowboy Billy Bob...

This is a story we were doing about Billy Bob Brown, a kid from our area, Carbon, Texas, who was going to the National High School Rodeo Finals. It's not totally uncommon for a kid from our area to go nationals, however, when the kid was born with only one lung and nearly died when he was born it makes the story a little better. That angle made for the story being kind of cool, but didn't really mean much for me shooting pictures.

One interesting thing about him was how much time he spends away from home. I had to go find him at a rodeo in Seymour, about 100 miles north of Abilene. What was interesting was he told me this was his sixth rodeo in 3 days! And, he and his roping partner Chace Thompson had been away from home for a week and weren't going to be back home for another two weeks! After the Seymour rodeo they were going to spend the night at Chace's house (which was only about 30 minutes south of Seymour) and then go to Oklahoma for a week before going to Wyoming for another week before finally coming home. It was pretty cool to hear how it worked, I knew the professional rodeo cowboys spent a lot of time on the road, but these guys just finished high school!

It was pretty cool hanging out with him and getting a behind the scenes look at how rodeo cowboys work. I've shot plenty of rodeos over the last 10 years but it's mostly just competition. With these guys I spent most of my time watching them getting ready and waiting for their competition. The competition parts only lasted about 3 total minutes. The rest of it was observing what exactly they do while waiting to compete. Most of it is cutting up with other cowboys to kill time.