Darren said "to borrow a phrase, this certainly wasn’t my first rodeo. That came in 1998, when Sports illustrated sent me to cover the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas. I'd never been to a rodeo before, much less the NFR, but I quickly fell in love with everything about the sport—from the event itself to the participants to the lifestyle surrounding the event. The NFR became a staple on my schedule, with the magazine sending me out to Las Vegas every December without a story or a writer, just the simple instruction to bring back a couple of good pictures for its front-of-the-book “Leading Off” section of two-page spreads. I guess I did something right, because that pattern continued for a dozen years, and in the midst of it, in 2002 I was named the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA) Rodeo Photographer of the Year. And yes, I have the belt buckle to prove it!"

"Things being what they were in the editorial business, eventually sending a photographer on a 5- or 10- day shoot without the justification of a story became a non-starter for the magazine, and my Decembers started looking a little different. (In the ‘Whenever one door closes, another one opens” department, the next year I was hired to shoot Dick’s Sporting Goods' annual golf buyers guide and online catalog, and for the next 10 years that occupied the NFR’s former place on my schedule)."

"I may have gotten out of the water, but always seemed to be dipping my toe back in—be it with a 5-day documentary assignment for Sports Illustrated on the itinerant lives of rodeo cowboys, a story on a school for aspiring rodeo clowns and bullfighters for ESPN, a portrait shoot for SI Kids, corporate work for my (then) local county's Chamber of Commerce, or a personal project on Charreria, the Mexican national sport from which American rodeo derives many of its traditions. So while I guess you can say I never really left, I was always hoping for the opportunity to dive back in head-first. Thanks to the folks at Teton Ridge, I was able to."