Sunday, October 26, 2008

Ring Girls

 
What would a fight night be without ring girls?

I was lucky; They were sitting just to my left the whole night and I got tons of shots of them (much to the amusement of the security guards who gave me high-fives and asked to see the shot every time I took a picture of the ladies.) I got shots of them posing with fans, strutting around the cage holding up the round cards, blowing kisses to the audience, etc., all the usual shots. But this is my favorite for the simple reason that they're just being themselves. A few of them were watching the fight. One of them was putting on makeup. And one of them was looking right back at me. I think she makes the photo most interesting; you let your eye wander all over them thinking you've caught them unawares, and then you realize you're being watched by one of them at the same time.

I had a hard time cropping this. I'm doing a lot of reading up on composition lately and so I wanted to crop it so that the face of the woman looking at me was at one of the intersections of that invisible "rule of thirds" grid. But I was limited in what I could do. She's right in the middle of the group, so any shift I made to put her at the left or right third meant that one or more of the girls to her left or right were getting axed. I would have preferred to use a rectangle, but there was a big ol' cardboard card cutting off the blonde on the left and distracting fans to the right, so all of the rectangles I tried were awkward-looking. I settled on a square but if I had thought about it at the time, I might have composed it differently to avoid the issues I had with it. Unfortunately, it was one of those "quick get it now" shots so I didn't have much time to think. I'm glad I snapped it, though, because it's my favorite of all the ring girls I took.

EDITED TO ADD:
Ok, I couldn't leave well enough alone. I've just uploaded the following alternate crop. For all the readers out there who have an opinion on these things, which do you prefer? The square crop (above)? or the rectangle crop (below)?

 

3 comments:

Moran Bentzur said...

Hard call. If I had to choose I'd go with the bottom shot because it has a more spacious feeling, providing the viewer with a little more context. The first one is full of those distracting legs all over the place... ;)

Dr. Error said...

hahahahaha.... I must be immune to those distracting legs. Were they really all over the place? ;-)

The nice thing about the first crop is that it's easier to see the brunette is the only one wearing fishnet stockings, another little detail that sets her apart.

Moran Bentzur said...

hmm.... I didn't notice the fishnet. Sounds like I need to stare at those pictures for a longer time (as if that's possible :)