Photos from Ringside
Jimmy asked me how I was doing with my photography last night at the Cage Warriors show. It’s something we always do between fights - chat shit and talk camera stuff.
“Getting any good shots mate?”
“Nope,” I said. “Fuck all.”
I wasn’t at the time, although things did get better later. The truth is that I was out of practice, and it took me a while to warm up again. Just like when you’ve had a lengthy period off the mat, it took some time for the cobwebs to disappear and for me to get into the rhythm of the fights.
I tinkered around with my settings a bit, experimenting with some different focal methods (my camera’s auto focus has been playing up, which is bugging me - might be to time to trade it in for a newer model). I managed to hit a happy medium a few fights in, but shooting MMA is always challenging. Especially when you’ve got to try and keep up with the hand speed of fighters such as Andre Winner.
What a lot of people don’t appreciate about ringside photography is that you really need to understand MMA to get the best of it. It’s not enough to just sit there with the shutter button pressed down firing off 12 frames a second. It’s like painting by numbers. The outcome will look acceptable and you’ll know what’s going on, but will you get the atmosphere, the drama, the emotion of the fight? Doubtful.
I sent a bunch of pics over to the main site for the magazine, but thought I’d post a few of the out-takes here. Enjoy.
April 21, 2008 at 1:11 am
cool photos. looking forward for the rest.
April 21, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Thanks for coming to the show. And thanks for the kind words beforehand. I appreciate it
April 22, 2008 at 11:01 pm
i like the photos of cfd does he know you have these ones if not ill inform him…… good shots man
April 23, 2008 at 4:39 am
OK, I am guilty of having a camera that fires off 10 shots a second, but fuck processing that lot!I agree totally about understanding the sport, and no where more evident than at cage rage is the newb non-mma tog a pain in the arse… people from newspapers and friends of people coming along, bursting the whole show and getting shit results. hell, even some photographers who were meant to understand the sport, and had been working around it for a lot time still got blurry results and shit colour tones, missing all the money shots to boot…
For something like the start of an imanari fight, or when you know winner is about to finish someone, or throw a flying knee, then burst is helpful. catching the emotion between stapleton and johnson after the fight having had a war, and then sitting, respecting each other for it as soon as the bell goes is better than any burst action shot in my mind.
April 23, 2008 at 11:19 am
Hear hear
And you’re so, so right about CR…
April 23, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Is it really that bad at CR nowadays? Do you still get the flash photographers
April 24, 2008 at 11:45 am
Not quite that bad… Although you still get a lot of confused looking people holding cameras and generally being a pain in the arse. And then the bods at CR have the gall to try to shut down on legit press passes because ‘they can’t have too many photographers at cage side’.