Body Shot

 

Got to shoot my second MMA event last Saturday night at the DC Armory (Battle at the Nation's Capital). It was..... a learning experience. First, the whole affair was rather informal with press allowed to mill about the cage area wherever they pleased. As the fighters moved around, so did the photographers and I found myself jockeying for a new position every time the fight moved to another side of the cage. There were some rounds where I didn't get one decent shot because the optimal side of the cage was already filled with photographers shoulder to shoulder.

Second, the catwalk around the cage was about twice the width of the last event I shot, which meant I couldn't get my lens as close to the cage as I would have liked. This made it much harder to get a clean shot of the fighters as the autofocus of my camera kept locking onto the chain links of the cage instead of the action inside. The night was a constant struggle trying to balance my depth of field so that the fighters were in focus but the chain links were not.

Third, I was stupidly left the exposure setting in multi-segment metering mode rather than in spot mode and didn't realize until halfway through the night after wondering why the hell my fighters were coming out blurry and overexposed. (The camera was fooled by the predominantly dark background and kept selecting slower shutter speeds to compensate.) The problem went away after I changed to spot metering, but a good portion of my shots suffered for it.

This is one that managed to come out ok. This is Beaux "Blackjack" Baker taking a kick to the ribs by Ron Foster. As nice a body shot as it is, it isn't representative of the fight. Baker dominated and submitted Foster 4 minutes into the first round. It's a good thing too. If he hadn't he'd probably never hear the end of it from his brother, Kyle, who enjoyed similar success against Foster a year earlier. (Yep, that's the same Kyle who I featured back in November. He fought last Saturday as well.)

As before, I'll feature some more shots from the event every day or so until I run out of good ones. In the meantime, I'm sifting through all of them and studying the settings of each so that I will be better next time. As a good friend of mine said, "it's only your 2nd go. Learn from it and get better next time."

The lesson learned from this weekend is: make a checklist of critical settings prior to an important event and CHECK THEM before shooting. I learned this lesson once before when I learned how to fly a plane; you'd think I would have remembered it when learning how to shoot a camera!