This rodeo had everything I was looking for: great light, dirt and danger, and a relaxed attitude about where I could go to shoot photos.

It was the first time the Monterey County Fair had ever featured a rodeo. This was a much smaller affair than the 100th California Rodeo Salinas, which I covered in July. And while I love shooting the Salinas rodeo, things can get a little formal there. In Salinas I couldn’t, for example, just climb onto the chutes and stick my camera a few inches from a bull’s nose — which wasn’t much of a problem in Monterey. It’s the same kind of reason that many pro photographers like shooting little league games after years of major league — it’s refreshingly open.

Click the thumbnails below …

Members of the military lead a group of flag carriers Friday at the start of the first-ever rodeo at the Monterey County Fair.

People hold a giant flag Friday at the start of the first-ever rodeo at the Monterey County Fair.

A horse rears during an event Friday during the Flying U Rodeo at the Monterey County Fair.

Cowboys watch from behind the chutes Friday during the Flying U Rodeo at the Monterey County Fair.

J.L. Hughes waits behind the chutes Friday during the Flying U Rodeo at the Monterey County Fair.

Junior Sator, 6, gets a hand riding a calf Friday during the Flying U Rodeo at the Monterey County Fair.

A bull rider competes Friday during the Flying U Rodeo at the Monterey County Fair.

Cowboys watch a bull rider compete Friday during the Flying U Rodeo at the Monterey County Fair.

The chute opens for Traivonn Hughes, 16, of Compton, during the bull riding competition Friday during the Flying U Rodeo at the Monterey County Fair.

Cowboys cheer as Kenneth Restani of Carmel Valley rides to a score of 86 Friday in the bull riding event at the first-ever rodeo at the Monterey County Fair. Rodeo action continues through the weekend, 6 p.m. Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday.

Traivonn Hughes, 16, of Compton, competes in bull riding Friday during the Flying U Rodeo at the Monterey County Fair.

Bulls wait behind the chutes Friday during the Flying U Rodeo at the Monterey County Fair.

Thomas Bushey of Lincoln — dressed as a woman — gets thrown while competing in the “Wild Ride” event Friday during the Flying U Rodeo at the Monterey County Fair.

Michael Braasch of Salinas prepares to compete in bull riding Friday during the Flying U Rodeo at the Monterey County Fair.

John Fischer of Louisville, Kentucky, prepares for his first-ever bull ride Friday during the Flying U Rodeo at the Monterey County Fair.

John Fischer of Louisville, Kentucky, falls during his first-ever bull ride Friday during the Flying U Rodeo at the Monterey County Fair.

Andreas McLeod of Corral de Tierra takes off his helmet after competing in the bull riding event Friday at the first-ever rodeo at the Monterey County Fair.

Nicholas Sartor of Fort Worth, Texas, is thrown after riding the a winning score of 87 in the bull riding competition Friday during the Flying U Rodeo at the Monterey County Fair.

Nicholas Sartor of Fort Worth, Texas, celebrates his winning score of 87 in the bull riding competition Friday during the Flying U Rodeo at the Monterey County Fair.

It was my third trip to Yosemite, but the first time I had seen it during peak travel season. A Saturday in the middle of summer. Thousands and thousands of people.

The photos I made that weekend were about the people covering the iconic landscape, more about the destination seekers than the destination itself.

This Yosemite photo essay originally appeared on the blog Is Greater Than, edited by my buddy Paul. I’ll be a somewhat regular contributor to his blog.

Nearly every photographer can relate a story about the magic they felt they were witnessing when they first waved a piece of photo paper in a tray of chemicals and watched as an image slowly emerged under the red darkroom lights.

For me, timelapse is kind of like that. You set up your camera, shoot for an hour, then later, when the frames are turned into a movie, you watch in amazement as clouds shoot whisk across the sky, people zip around at a breakneck pace, and the restrictions of time melt away.

I made this timelapse video over the course of an entire day at the 100th California Rodeo Salinas, starting before dawn and ending after dusk with the nightly fireworks show.

The video represents at least 5,000 frames shot and many hours of work.

One of my plans for coverage of the 100th California Rodeo Salinas was to make a highly detailed panorama, one that people in the crowd might be able to see themselves in, that would show the breadth and scope of the event in a single frame — as well as being something new and different for my newspaper’s website.

instead of buying the small robotic picture-taking device, we rented one from LensRentals.com in Tennessee.

The 10-day rental gave me enough time to practice with the Gigapan, which is actually quite easy to use.

You calibrate it for your camera’s field of view, you set the upper left and lower right corners of your image area, and away it goes.

It even comes with stitching and uploading programs to get your Gigapan image assembled and displayed online.

I had trouble with subject movement while shooting — women on horseback got cut in half, leaving bizarre floating torsos and unattached hoofed limbs. Some work in Photoshop to manually stitch the images cleared that up, but I needed quite a bit of computer power — at one point I was working with a one-gigabyte image with 13 layers.

Zoom in and poke around the image above, there’s plenty to see.

What was it like for photographers 100 years ago?

That was the question that led me to my little project of shooting the 100th California Rodeo Salinas with a 100-year-old camera.

I had the good fortune of being able to borrow such a camera from local camera collector Chuck Karnow, whose arsenal fills a room in his house and numbers nearly 500.

The four photos shown here are half of the 6x9cm frames I shot on the roll of 120 film. I’m amazed by the fact that a camera 100 years old takes film that’s still readily available and that the frames numbers on the film still match the frame counter window of this 100-year-old machine.

The folding bellows camera had just two shutter speeds — 1/25th and 1/50th of a second. The aperture dial wasn’t labeled, and the aperture blades — which are on the outside of the lens — were continuously variable from what we guessed to be about f3.5 to what we guessed to be f22.

Fortunately, our educated guess on exposure and the forgiving latitude of film produced a roll of properly exposed negatives — except for the final frame, when the shutter stuck open, denying me a portrait of a sitting cowboy before his saddle bronc ride.

Mine was not any kind of authentic test — This was color film, not black and white, and the ISO was far higher than what was used back then. To make deadline, the film was processed at a lab and scanned digitally.

It was just a fun exercise in using historic technology at an historic event.

Here are a few more frames from the roll.

And here’s the goofy behind-the-scenes video I made: