Hutchinson ? It’s an Indian summer day and sunshine warms the driveway where Kent Kerschner has just changed the oil in his pickup truck.

The front door of his home/photo studio stands open. Visitors and photo customers are welcomed by the twang of a guitar and voice duo on the Cowboy Music Channel.

“It’s always on in the house,” Kerschner begins, nodding toward the giant-screen television that floats from one Western scene to another. “That’s the only channel it knows.”

On this day, the man known across rodeo country by the trademark “Foto Cowboy” wears his signature black felt 10-gallon hat, a wide-buckled belt at the waist of his blue jeans.

His living room is lined with a sampling of the decades of pictures he’s snapped. Cowboys, bull riders, rodeo queens and little kid mutton busters line the walls. More framed photos are propped along the back of the couch and lean against other furniture.

What he wanted to show is on top of the television.

“It’s the old wind-up — look at the red dot on the back that says No. 1, and go on to 2,” Kerschner instructed as he lifted the Brownie box camera from its perch.

About a month ago, Kerschner’s mother came across the cardboard camera that Kerschner’s grandmother gave him 27 years ago. It was among his childhood possessions, dropped in a box with his name penciled on the side.

The camera brought back how much he enjoyed capturing life’s moments on film even as a child.

Kent Kerschner poses with a camera that his grandmother gave him 27 years ago. Kerschner, of Hutchinson, is known throughout rodeo country as Foto

But there was a bonus: It was still loaded with a 12-exposure roll of film.

Kerschner had the film developed and recalled the scenes he captured when he was 9: Daisy, his mixed-breed dog; Kitty Kat, the family feline; a mix of outdoor shots, from a winter snowstorm through summer; Phyllis and Lonnie, his mom and dad, as they looked more than three decades ago.

Kerschner kept up his photography through high school, then added bull riding to his resume.

He started on the mechanical bulls, fed with quarters, at the Kansas State Fair. He graduated to the real thing, roaring out of rodeo chutes.

Those days are behind him.

“I’m 44 years old, and it was time to give it up,” he said. “I wasn’t no pro. I did it for the fun.”

He still heads to the rodeo grounds many weekends, to shoot pictures of cowboys and cowgirls. He has also added weddings, senior photos and other special events.

His pictures have appeared in an array of rodeo and cowboy theme publications and have also been displayed at shows and contests all the way to New York City.

“You don’t take that many pictures for money alone; you do it because you really like it,” a Hutchinson cowboy, Lucky Keller, said about Kerschner’s work. “He takes a few chances. He loves it.”

A picture Keller particularly likes is one Kerschner captured at the Kansas State Fair four years ago, just as the bull Keller was riding kicked its heels over its head.

“I went for $2,000 that night,” Keller remembered.

While the cowboys and cowgirls measure their rush by seconds as they straddle a bull or race through a barrel course, armed with his camera, Kerschner’s adrenaline pumps much longer, he said.

“My rush is the whole show,” he said. “That’s why I love it.”