February 7, 2026

The Photo Workshop, “Magic of Cowboys” was led by Lisa Langell with an incredible array of other instructing photographers, cowboys and cowgirls, and volunteers at the Don Donnelly Ranch in Gold Canyon, Arizona. We had 20 participant photographers from all over the country.

The second morning, Lisa decided we should do the ridge line silhouettes again as the clouds in the sky were much prettier than the day before. The man and wife team, Duncan and Bonnie, from Montana again were crossing and recrossing a ridge so that we could photograph their silhouettes.

The next activity took place in a corral where the cowboys herded the horses and attempted to rope some of them. I have so many good photos of the horses running that it is hard to choose.

The next sequence features the roping of the horses.

In the next series of photos, the cowboys were herding the long horn cattle in the corral and again attempting to rope them. Those horns look very intimidating as I tried to isolate them.

The next series shows how they rope a cow and then eventually release her. In the first photo the cow is already roped. The second photo shows how a second cowboy throws a rope around the back feet. In the third photo the cow is tripped and tipped over. In the last photo the rope is removed from around the neck and the back feet rope is relaxed so that the cow steps out of it. In a rodeo two cowboys work together and accomplish this feat in a few seconds. One cowboy explained all this to me, the roping of the feet must be timed to perfection and is almost miraculous to me.

The last series of photos shows more roping.

After lunch we did portraits with various light setups and I also got some grab shots. The first two cowgirls posed for high key photos. They are sisters, McKenna and Ashley. Ashley, on the right, has three kids at home and a litter of new born puppies watched by her husband for three days. She was quite a character and posed for me a lot.

The next series are low key portraits with purposeful dark shadows and special lighting. I like the men with their elaborate mustaches.

As sunset is approaching with low light the cowboys made a series of galloping runs down the lane which resulted in lots of dust and quite a few high key photos.

Now sunset is only a few minutes away and the cowboys and girls made several runs towards us as we were looking almost directly into the sun.

This concludes day 2 with the dusty sunset. Stay tuned for day 3.