With chilly fingers and the right light, Atascadero photographer Cheryl Strahl clicked her shutter closed repeatedly to capture cowboys and cowgirls on horseback at a ranch in Wyoming.
The results of that trip to The Hideout guest ranch near Shell, Wyoming—Capturing the Magic of Cowboy Country—will hang on the walls of The Photo Shop in downtown San Luis Obispo through Jan. 15. Photographs of red hills with fresh snow sidle up next to bundled-up cowboys and cowgirls, horses with and without riders, and landscapes awash in a golden glow.
“Photography allows me to get out and experience things, things I’ve never done before, seen before,” Strahl said. “I never would have experienced all the places I’ve been if it hadn’t been for photography.”
Her pilgrimage to the 650,000-acre ranch came courtesy of a photography workshop from Action Photo Tours, one of several Strahl’s taken since retiring from her software engineering gig in the drilling industry. Although workshops aren’t the only reason or way in which she travels the world, they are something that’s taken her from Alaska’s North Slope for polar bears (bears are her favorite thing to photograph, she said) to Venice, Italy, for Carnival celebrations.
After she retired, Strahl said, she decided to get serious about photography and enrolled in a National Geographic photography workshop in New Mexico. There, she did street photography in Santa Fe and captured the scenery on Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch.
What she learned there enabled her to see the world with a different eye.
“It just got me … to really know what to look for. Not just take pictures, but actually to do photography, which is actually visualizing, knowing what you’re looking for, composing, looking for the right light—all of those come together,” Strahl said. “It’s hard to explain. It’s just a feeling; you just know when you’re getting it.”
The nice bonus about attending workshops, she said, is that the folks leading them know where and when the best light is, where the best scenes will be. They really are experts, she said.
She was in Wyoming for a week, she said, and they shot five of the seven days they were there. Photographers went out early in the morning for sunrise and out in the evening for sunset. Their subjects were local cowboys and cowgirls, who either owned their own ranches or worked in the area; horses; and the expansive scenery.
“Most of the shots were action shots,” she said. “So that was a challenge.”
The very first morning they went out, temperatures were below zero and one of her camera bodies actually froze up, which is why you always bring two camera bodies on a trip, she said with a laugh.
“I got to go out into the Wild West every day, and photography just kind of became the frosting on the cake,” she said. “Just being there with all the cowboys and cowgirls and the horses and the scenery, that was the true trip for me.” Δ
Editor Camillia Lanham is ready for a trip back to Montana. Send art tips to clanham@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Nov 28 – Dec 8, 2024.