Milking a Sunset

How many calendar worthy images can one create in a single sunset?

Last week was on a assignment for a national farm magazine to shoot a huuuge 50,00 acre angus cattle ranch for the their annual America’s Young Rancher and Farmer promotional awards.

It is very difficult to capture the vastness of the open range in a photograph. To give some scale I put objects in the foreground. Page, Ty and Doc (the dog) could have been hired from a model agency, but they are real folks. They are also really nice folks to put up with me.

I found out just how nice by asking them repeatedly to “go stand by the fence waaayy over there”. Or “go walk up and down the road over and over until I tell you to quit.” Great! "Okay, stand there for 20 minutes while I see if the sun will peek back out" ….waiting… waiting.. Now! Action!! “walk back the other way”! Perfect! "Do it again!!!

As the sun began to go down and we entered the “golden hour” we started at the top of the bluffs then worked our way to the valley floor, shooting these vast landscape scenes as we descended. It began to get funny (to me) after asking them for the 10th time to “walk up and down the fence/road/bluff). Each scene was more spectacular than the last. I kept saying “This can’t get better”, but it did.

Finally, as the sun burned out for the day I ran completely out of usable light and called a wrap. I must say, I feel like I really milked this sunset on the cattle ranch. (Yeah, I'm a city boy but I know you don't milk cattle.. now!)