• 06-01-2011, 09:15 PM
    zerodog
    Turning Poo into Lemonade...
    Last fall I went to shoot a Muay Thai seminar at a local MMA gym to see two masters do their thing and teach a pretty cool class. I had just gotten there and things were just winding up.

    As I found, this gym is really hard to shoot at, due to very mixed light from a few horrible overhead lights and a large window that provides ever changing light. Combine that with a red floor and 1 red wall 1 yellow wall and 1 white wall. At this point I had only taken a few shots and was still figuring this place out. The two masters were going through a routine. It was pretty cool. Lots of kicks, knees, elbows, the whole deal. Pretty easy to follow. Until this.... I wish I could convey the sound of this. The yell this dude let out as he leaped into the air directly in front of me throwing this skull crushing flying elbow. It was fricken amazing in every way. The fact that a dude that big, jumped that high that fast blew my mind. I was really happy to have caught it. I was not ready for it at all because of the rhythm of what was going on previous to this. Top it off with the fact I was really pretty close sitting on the mat.

    For this sequence the color was terrible and the exposure was not very good. But the owner/ guy flying through the air, loved this sequence. They weren't the best shots from the day and they are not even that good period. Cropped a lot, bad color, bad exposure. So I did the photojournalist trick and converted them to B&W. It can make a crappy photo.........less crappy.:D It took a ton of work to get them here. And I am happy with the end result.

    Since then I shot another seminar (Jiu Jitsu) and got to know some of the instructors and fighters from the gym. A few of the guys convinced me to come down try Jiu Jitsu. I am now a member there. It has been a great experience. I decided to give the owner this sequence of photos as a gift.

    This is how I am framing these. 9x9 photos with a matte 36x15". I printed them myself on Hahnemule Photorag. Lots of proofs and tweaking to get them just how I wanted. Turning poop into lemonade! They came out really nice.

    http://theinfinitymachine.smugmug.co...mpHoriz-X3.jpg
  • 06-02-2011, 03:53 PM
    GB1
    Re: Turning Poo into Lemonade...
    Not a bad trick to remember. I myself use the black and white one, but if the shots aren't sharp enough for large output, use a multitude of them as one, allowing you to shrink them down to where they're adequately sharp.

    I also like your choice of colors: black, gray, and red
  • 06-03-2011, 07:44 AM
    zerodog
    Re: Turning Poo into Lemonade...
    It was one of those deals where I had to tweak the exposure enough that the color was sort of screwed. That and the RED floor. They also needed to be balanced. I might have been on Aperture priority at that point? Can't remember I usually shoot manual. But each one was slightly different. In the end B&W let me go really high contrast and make it pop. I blurred the BG a bit in photoshop to make the subjects pop more. And due to the cropping on these, you are right, really big format would be a problem. But I think I could get away with something quite a bit bigger than 9x9 on this too. Maybe 15". But in the end this needed to be a sequence. And it will be a large framed image in the end. But these are all things that could have been vastly improved on if I just shot it right in the first place. I am just happy to be able to bring them up to this level with some computer time.
  • 06-03-2011, 11:51 AM
    Photo-John
    Great!
    Thanks for sharing this! It's a good example of how to be flexible and creative when things don't work out as planned. Black-and-white is great whenever color *distracts* from the content, which I can see it would in this situation. And the tryptich is also a great example of how a sequence of photos can be used when a single image doesn't get the idea across.

    Glad to have you here, Rob :)