Stock Shows, Week 2...

This week was the last of the tiny stock shows of just the individual schools to cover, next week things start to ramp up with the county stock shows which have a lot more competitors and last more than just a day. This week I shot Wylie and Merkel's shows.

This Little Piggy Went to the Stock Show...

There are a couple things I can always count on in January. The first is horribly bad basketball within the city limits of Abilene. The other is stock shows. The first weekend starts out with the smaller ones and they grow bigger as the month goes on. This weekend I went to Trent. One of the cool things about these little shows is they are usually in really old, rather small barns with a lot of really cool light. One thing about shooting pis though, is they often don't have a particular direction they are going, they just sort of go where they want and especially the smaller kids will have a hard time pointing them in the right direction, that always make for fun photos.

Hog Heaven...

This week was my sixth and final week of round of photo columns. December was whirling by so fast with football playoffs, I didn't have a whole lot of time to really think of good ideas and with the Christmas season there were plenty of easy quick, albeit mediocre ideas out there to get done quickly.

This was kind of a re-hashing of a photo column I did about 6 or 7 years ago. The good thing about it is it can pretty much be done every year and keep getting a different story every year. The best part is it doesn't take a whole lot of searching on my part beyond calling up the county extension agent and asking for a family they think "may make for a good story." If it's one thing I've learned from 10 years of doing this it's to work smarter, especially in finding your stories, that way I'll have more time to do my actual shooting, especially on the fun stories.

I was given a lady's name and phone number and told she had two kids that showed pigs. That's about all I had to go on until I called her. It turned out things were a lot more interesting. The youngest child had a big brother from Big Brothers/Big Sisters who had showed pigs all through his childhood and was there to help out quite a bit. The story that I thought would be just ok, turned out to be really interesting and one I'm glad I was able to tell.

I hung out with them for about two hours (the whole time they were there). It was really interesting to see how the pigs reacted to the kids and some of the stories they told. I ended up getting a lot more information than I could tell. My favorite photo (top) was when the girl hopped out of her pig's cage, I like the way it showed everything, the pigpens, the kid, the barn and everything. But the part that made the shot for me was her hopping out of the pen and the slight motion blur, all that combined with the leopard print rubber boots she was wearing just made everything right. Here is a link to the story I wrote for the paper: In Hog Heaven.