This past weekend was the Santa Cruz County Fair in Sonoita, AZ. It was everything you’d expect from a small town fair. There was the typical fair games and rides scene with the overpriced sub-par food. Somehow, I still managed to enjoy a large corn dog – every once in a while they’re oh-so-good. Unfortunately, it took us a few hours to find the animals. It’s not a large fair and we clearly didn’t look hard enough the first go ’round. I enjoy the animals. I can’t remember having ever seen turkeys shown at a fair before but the kids from Santa Cruz and other surrounding counties have been working hard over the past year – the turkeys looked healthy and ready for this upcoming November. The kids were drawn to the most simple ride – a merry-go-round style ride with cars and trucks instead of animals. I guess they figure the real thing is in the next tent over so steer (pun intended) away from tradition.
Around sunset, I moseyed my way back to the west side of the fair grounds where those involved will park their trailers and RVs for the week. Mount Wrightson is in the distance so I figured it would make for a magnificent sunset – and it did – and I missed all the good shots!
I’ll work my way from the bottom up here. This photo is the best one of the sunset itself, in my opinion. Rather of all the photos I took that night, this one displays the sunset the best despite that I don’t like the composition. If I could take it again I would get down lower so that the bush/tree rose up above the horizon a bit more. I think the composition would’ve been more interesting and the ugly fence post wouldn’t have been in the photo. I don’t like this one enough to edit out the post. Should I decide it’s a worthwhile endeavor, I’ll update this post with the edited version.
The remaining photos looked unappealing on the small camera screen so I didn’t spend much time getting the shot perfect. But, of course, when I loaded them into the computer I enjoyed the composition. These old pieces of wood look somewhat like fence posts. They’re a bit too large to be posts for a fence but the photo tells a story of succession. Perhaps at one time the wood and wire on the right were able to keep the cattle in the pasture but with age, weather, and the advancement of technology, metal posts with sharp barbed wire have succeeded their wooden and rusted predecessors.
This one took me a bit to figure out what I wanted it to look like. What caught my eye was the reflection of the sky in the window. For some reason, I like the red structures on the left even though they also feel slightly distracting. The original photo was taken in landscape orientation. Only when I was re-reading this post did I realize that it should be in portrait. I wish I had taken a couple more with varying compositions. The distortion in the 20mm lens would’ve been nice to elongate the path a bit. I’ll include the original below for grins.
I found this old truck in the back corner of the fair grounds. I like that the antenna is bent over in a couple of different places. The driver parked seemingly straight into the sunset. To me, it’s somewhat of a romantic photo. I can see a couple in their 48th year of marriage sitting in the cab. He was finishing up work and invited his wife to watch the sunset like they have done for the past 48 years. Or maybe this is just a junky truck at a small town fair… and the skull on the antenna ornament ruins the story. I just pretend it’s not there. I could try to edit it out but it’s a large enough portion of the photo that I’m worried it may be too challenging.
This photo looked pretty terrible to me on the camera screen and turned out to be one of my favorite ones I took! I recently got a new lens that I wanted to try out. I thought the disc plow would be good foreground subject with the sunset behind it. The gates or fences on the left are nice as well. This photo makes me quite happy with this lens – most things are in focus throughout the frame and I wasn’t but a foot or so from the discs. At f/13, that’s sort of what I’d expect (I think – I’m still new at this). My regret with this photo is not taking another shot once the sunset really started (thus the title of this post). As you can see from my other photos, it was very pretty that evening. I took this photo about five minutes too early and didn’t come back to it because I couldn’t tell that the composition was working on the small screen of the camera. I’ve got to work on my eye with that.