Fight Night At The Radisson Hotel

Several professional fighters train at my gym, so I arranged to take photos for them at the fights last week. It turned out to be one of the most difficult photo shoots I have ever done.

The promoter, Nasser Niavaroni, let me sit at ringside - the best possible spot. The ring was set up in a ballroom at the Radisson Hotel in North Sacramento. One bad thing about sitting ringside - the ropes are in the way half the time.



You can see my other photos on my SmugMug page.

The lighting was poor with just a few overheads shining directly down on the fighters. I was using an 85mm lens with the f-stop wide open at f1.2 aperture and ISO 1600 giving me a typical shutter time of 1/500 to stop the action. Because of the bright overheads, I had to use -2/3 exposure compensation to avoid blown-out highlights, but that left most of the image dark with abundant noise. To make matters worse, the ring canvas was bright red adding an annoying red cast to the fighters.

My camera, Canon 1D Mark II, is a "sports" camera designed to capture fast action. I set the focus point to the center of the frame and used AI-servo focusing mode to continually keep the center of the image in focus. The fighters moved fast all around the ring making manual focus too dificult. At times they were right above me on the ropes and within seconds they would be across the ring in the far corner.

I held the shutter button 1/2 half down and tracked one of the fighters in the viewfinder. When I saw (or anticipated) action, I pressed down fully to grab a few shots (at 3 frames per second). With an f1.2 aperture, the depth of field is very shallow making focus critical. Often I would adjust the frame to take in both fighters, but that would place the focus point in the background between the two bodies and throw them out of focus.

I shot over 1200 images and got maybe 24 that I think are interesting and printable. It gives me renewed appreciation for some of those great fight photos I have seen over the years.