Grappling Tournament

[zerodog]

I shot another grappling event last weekend. Pretty cool sport to watch and one I am thinking of trying myself. Grappling is mostly Jiu Jitsu. But it can incorporate many styles or not styles of various other martial arts or wrestling. There is no striking, no points and not very many rules. This event was not timed either. Basically you wrestle someone until they give up/ tap out. One of the matches lasted over an hour. Imagine wrestling someone for 1 hour with no breaks!

So besides being a challenging sport to do, it is a very challenging sport to shoot. It is all ambient light, no flashes allowed. At this location there were up to 8 matches going on at once. It was also in a gymnasium with those horrible gym lights above and some windows on the sides that caused quite a few issues.

#1 Submission by sweat drips......


#2 Cute!


#3 The guy on the bottom is winning at this point.


#4 Lots of choking going on.


#5


#6


#7

[Photo-John]

These are great, Rob. That D3s is just amazing in low light! What ISO are you using for these, anyway? How about shutter speed?

I really dig that second to last one. Have you tried a tighter crop on it? I'd like to see one focused just on the two guys. That's such an intense scene I think I'd just get rid of all the background. Just a thought

[zerodog]

All of the shots I took that day were all shot at ISO 12,800 f 3.5 and shutter speeds from 1/200-1/800 depending on which direction I was facing to the horrible windows. I try to keep the shutter speed up to at least 1/500 but the light was so bad here that I got down as low as 1/200 for many shots.

Yeah that 2nd to the last one would be cool tighter. I think all of these are the crops right out of the camera. I really tried to focus on that for this event to get my processing down to almost nothing. I still ended up tweaking a bit. But I had about 80% of the photos up the day after the event and had them all up by monday morning. Not too bad for getting about 2000 photos up and online.

[Bookie]

Nice shots! I was wondering what your white balance was. Was it custom or auto.
I do alot of gymnastic meets and they are all in those lovely caves. I only have a....D40 :blush2: ...not to many wb settings, but my friend lets me use his D5000 wich has more.
Any info/help would be great.
-Greg

[zerodog]

I set custom WB with an expodisk. These only needed the slightest WB tweak to make them slightly warmer. But they were pretty good straight out of the camera.

IMO when shooting low light WB is one of the critical things to get right. Even shooting RAW. Because it will help you get your exposures more accurate. The less you need to mess with exposure in PP the less noise you bring out in PP.

[Bookie]

Thanks for the info.

[JMK]

Nice work, fun set.