Fight Kings--Some Utah MMA

[zerodog]

Some seriously rough light here. This was the worst I have encountered yet. In certain areas of the ring the blue and magenta color cast was terrible.. No amount of WBing could do it. Played with some desaturation on certain colors and it helped a bit. In the end, it is what it is.

The other kicker with this event was this. There was another photographer there, and he had strobes. Big studio ones strapped to the cage, and an on camera flash. WTH?? this has never ever been allowed at any combat sport I have shot. They won't even let me use on camera flash for grappling. So this was also a factor in some of my shots.
These were all shot between 1/640 and 1/800 f2.8 and ISO 10,000-12,800
#1


#2


#3
Almost awesome! Missed focus a bit but these guys were also really moving fast in a 1st round flurry. I still love it.


#5


#6 One of my favs of the night.


#7

[zerodog]

This is my 2nd body with a 17-55. I try to set it at f3.5 or higher. This lets you see the fence and gives me more latitude for focus being a bit off. If they are on top of you, there is no way to blow the fence out. So you might as well see it how it was.

This is one a split second before the guy on top tapped out. These are with a 300s 17-55 1/250 f3.2 iso 2500.


This is what happens shooting through a fence. This is the guy tapping. But the focus decided to grab the fence. Getting cross fence like this is bad. It makes the fence have more surface area and your camera wants to grab it more. With a longer lens it also becomes more apparent that it is there.


This one is from inside. You can see on here that the skin tone on the face of the guy on the right is almost normal. Then down by the legs a serious magenta tone. The dude on the left is sort of blue. This place had some terrible light. But at the same time I sort of like the way these came out with the weird color. Gives it sort of a feel. And it is how it looked to be there.

[SmartWombat]

#6 looks almost vampiric with that skin tone, is that from the coluor of the canvas ?

[Photo-John]

Thanks for talking about the fence, Rob. Shooting through fence is one problem that manual focus might solve. But you'd have to be really good at focusing manually. And at least all the bad ones would be your own damn fault

I really like #6. It doesn't show any fight action but it sure does have strong emotion.

Did you complain about the strobes? Is there going to be any action about that? Does the guy who used the strobes have some special pull that you don't?

[zerodog]

Manual is a good option and I have done it before. My hit rate with it isn't much better because this stuff is moving quickly. For these shots with the wide lens, the guys came from the middle of the ring (shooting with the 70-200) to right in front of me in a second and slammed to the ground. I drop the big camera and grab the wide angle and go. I have a sequence of 6 or so shots in focus, the last one with the tap is out because I moved or the camera decided for me. This all happened in about 2 seconds. One big thing that helps is adjusting the tracking on the AF. For both of my Nikons I set it to long. This gives you more time before it locks onto something else. Sometimes I grab the wide angle body and just point it push half way to focus and let it rip not even getting to really look through the view finder. Sometimes this is because I am holding the camera over my head. This is hit or miss but I have some great shots doing this too.