PHOTOGRAPHER MATT O'BRIEN spent countless hours of his childhood on his cousins' East Bay cattle ranch. He's always loved cowboy culture – not the kind that most of us read about in books, but the kind with real dirt, real cows, and most important, real cowboys. He started taking pictures of cattle ranches throughout Alameda and Contra Costa Counties about 13 years ago. O'Brien's photos include a lot of traditional country-western imagery, like roundups, hog-tying, and leathery-looking guys wearing Wranglers, but he also tries to capture other important aspects of ranch life on film, including the roles of women and children and even an unflinching look at cow branding and bull castration. The quotes displayed beside each photo come from his interviews with local ranchers. Many of them express mourning for this distinctly western and rapidly vanishing way of life. Others are full of dry humor: "I love the ranching life," the quote next to a picture of a woman rancher reads. "When I was getting divorced I swear I lived with that SOB a lot longer than I needed to put up with his crap because I was really worried about moving to town ... to go live in a tract house. We had the nicest bunch of cows. I'm not kidding, those are actual really things I thought about." Several of O'Brien's photos show freeways and houses in the background – the encroaching tendrils of suburbia. His newest series is called "The Valley Weeps," a close-up look at suburbanization in Dougherty Valley, where ranchers have been evicted to make room for 11,000 new tract homes. The exhibition also includes many kitchen and ranching objects, dating as far back as 1840, from Walnut Creek's historic Old Borges Ranch.