At the end of the between Christmas and New Year's Day I usually spend some time reviewing my website and the photos in my portfolio. It's not as easy as many might think. I have to take great care to add and subtract photos to best represent my style of shooting and to interest a potential publisher or ad agency to license them. Then once I know what photos I want to show I need to re-size them, edit them all over again, and add keywords and metadata so they can be found online. All of these jobs are important, but none of them are particularly glamorous tasks to say the least. That said, the people in these photos certainly do harder work, so it is important to keep things in perspective.
This past weekend as my Green Bay Packers were getting their rear ends beat on national TV I took the time to review my portfolio of cowboy and ranch photos. I have literally thousands of cowboy and ranch photos I have made over the years to sift through. And selecting the best ones (not too many, not too few) wasn't easy. But I did manage to get the job done. The fact the Packers stunk up the field made my job a little easier.
When I was done I added more than 20 new photos to my cowboy gallery of photography. And instead of just adding them quietly and moving on to the next gallery I thought I should collect those new photos separately and publish a new blog post with them under the guise of my 20+ photos feature. Those 20+ photos are included here.
Those of you who follow me regularly will recognize many of them. However, some of them are new, even though they may have been taken several years ago. None of them appeared on my website in my gallery of cowboy photos before now. And each of them are photos of action as it happened...documentary photos depicting the way of life for cowboys and ranchers working near the Bear Paw Mountains in northern Montana. And while some of the people in the photos go out of their way to avoid my camera, others mug for it too. But none of these shots are staged like so many other photographers do.
In 2016 I will continue to make ranch photos of the people who live and work in the Bear Paws, but I will branch out a little more too. I want to photograph more ranches around the state of Montana, not just on the Hi-Line. And I will be asking you for help in finding some of the old school ranching operations that still exist around the state. In the mean time, please enjoy these 20 new photos I added to my portfolio this weekend. I hope you enjoy them all.
To see all of the photos now in my gallery of cowboy images CLICK HERE.
