Facing the trail, Buddy the horse anxiously waits for the ride to commence and allows the grateful photographer one last steady exposure. (Will Parson/Guardian)

I used to ride horses. Not very often, mind you, but enough
to know a thing or two, and enough to get tired of it. Living the semi-rural
life all the way up through high school, I learned to link horses with long hot
days on the dusty valley floor outside Bakersfield,
working my family’s cattle. I was glad to leave the hard hours in a saddle
behind when I started college. But, like a lot of people who grow up and leave
home, I began to miss my character’s foundry once I was cast from the mold.
When my sister recently offered me a chance to go horseback riding with her and
a friend, I jumped at the opportunity.

“You can take pictures,” my sister assured me, as if I
needed further reason to go. She knows me well; a chance to take an interesting
picture is enough to get me to go just about anywhere.

The group of riders unloaded their horses and checked their saddles just before the sun dipped below the horizon. (Will Parson/Guardian)

On this occasion, though, I almost went without my camera. A
horse demands your full attention, and I didn’t want to ruin both the ride and
my camera by trying to juggle the two. I decided the best way to dodge a
problem was to leave my bulky digital camera at home and use my reliable film
camera, a rangefinder.

My camera holds true to classic rangefinder form. The basic
style has been around since the 1930s, and helped realize the genius vision of
journalists and artists like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and Garry
Winogrand. Its design is simple: with few moving parts, it feels as solid as a
brick in my hand. It’s also small and the shutter is discreet. There is no
flash, nothing automatic and barely a flicker of electricity. When I first
bought it, I went through dozens of rolls of film just getting used to how it
feels looking through the viewfinder. So now, it is less of a piece of
equipment and more of an extension of my eye, capturing intimate frames from
moment to moment with fluid ease.

This is a camera I can trust, and so I brought it with me
that sunset, when our truck and trailer were speeding out of town on an empty
highway. The evening light was beautiful, but a mixed blessing. I had loaded my
camera with film that would give me incredibly vivid colors, but the drawback
was that it had very low sensitivity to light. In a cruel twist of irony, I had
to accept that as the light faded and the sky became more dramatic, I would be
less and less able to represent it faithfully.

At one point where the highway crosses a dry river, we
unloaded our horses. I got acquainted with Buddy, the horse I would be riding.
My sister and her friend would ride Lorenzo and Joe, respectively. I checked
Buddy’s saddle, and added some length to the stirrups (as I’ve usually done as
a tall person borrowing a shorter person’s equipment). I was thrilled to hoist
myself onto the saddle. I focused my camera on my sister’s cowboy hat and
framed a photograph toward the west, into the setting sun. I turned Buddy
around to view the trail, took another
photo and we headed east to begin our route along the sandy riverbed.

All my former confidence in my camera immediately vanished.
My eye was steady and calm, but even with our horses at a slow walk, raising
the camera to my eye made the world convulse. Nothing in the quiet, peaceful
riverbed looked sensible through the achingly small viewfinder. I couldn’t make
the beautiful images I wanted match the feeling I had inside. In denial, I made
one last effort by stopping Buddy in his tracks. I took a picture of the two
riders as the distance between us increased. Buddy did not like this — he is a
leader, not a follower.

As I quickly cocked my shutter for a second photo, Buddy
suddenly took off at a gallop toward the other two horses. I lost my hat to the
wind, and my camera was loose and beating on my hip on every stride. I found
out that it not only feels like a brick in my hand, but also against every part
of my torso. One foot was out of the stirrup. I couldn’t hear it, but my pelvis
tripped the shutter. This photo came back as a shot of my chin taken from
waistline viewpoint. If it wasn’t so blurry you’d be able to see my clenched
teeth.

Buddy, satisfied, slowed to a trot as he brought me back to
the group. I was happy too, and not just because I hadn’t been thrown off.
Despite the unexpected burst of speed, I had handled myself fairly well. After
four years I hadn’t forgotten how to ride!

I brought Buddy to a lope to secure myself, and then we all
worked in a few hard gallops over a half hour before turning around to head
back. We stopped for a few minutes for group photos for the family album, but
besides that my pictures alternated between dark and blurry.

I didn’t mind. It’s rare to truly match experiences with a
still image anyway. Not that I can’t try, since it’s always nice to remember things
through a photo, but a lot of the time a memory will do a better job.
Nevertheless, even with a rank horse like Buddy between my legs, I still got in
a few lasting shots.