More GLOWing boxing...

Here's a further small selection of images from the boxing tournament at the Glow Arena at the Bluewater shopping complex, held on 13th October.

Technically, as I've noted already, the TV lights made things a bit easier than the amateur tournaments I've done up til now. These are often in very gloomy school sports halls with the ISO jammed against the upper reaches of even a D3. Here at Glow, with the TV lights, ISOs were a slightly more sensible 2500/3200, which is well within the capability of the D3S bodies I have now. Exposure was 1/640th at f4 on the 24-70, for just a little helpful depth of field. I also used my 70-200, but this lens, truth be told, is a little darker than the nominal f2.8, so I used f3.5 and the higher of the ISO settings.

White balance was also fairly simple, though I still tweaked the raw files for skin tone. A couple of quick snaps of my hand suggested the Tungsten preset, with a little extra warming (A2?) dialled in. This gave me reasonable Jpegs out of camera, though a fully-custom white balance is the way to go if shooting 'peg exclusively.

The AF setting was Continuous, with a point set which is off-centre, and used this way from previous experience. I'm not sure if this is the way the boxing "regulars' work, but it's what seems to do for me. What you do is keep the off-centre point over the boxer on that side, assuming they are broadly parallel to you, and let the camera do it's thing.  9 or 21 Point selection was active here. I might try the 3D option at the next amateur bout and see how that will work. But for now I stuck with what I was familiar with and knew did work OK.

I'm still not sure I rate Pro boxing very much. It's not a sport I seek out on TV, for example. The much longer bouts of the main events, 12 rounds, seemed to drag and just give shot after shot that looked, well, the same. Although I had over 2300 images by the end of the evening, I found I was shooting much more sparingly by the final headline fight. Amateur boxing, with its head-guards, short bouts and less "cuddling" between boxers (less blood, too...) seems much more interesting to me. It doesn't attract the big bucks, of course...

Right. Enough techie stuff. The pictures...

Lenny Daws, left, fights Ville Piispanen for the vacant EU Super Lightweight Championship.
D3S, 24-70 at 32mm. The wider shots looked nice, with the lights putting the ring brighter than the
rest of the hall. School sports hall lighting just can't do this, so I don't shoot the very wide images there.

More after the break...

The GLOW of boxing...

A quickie post...

The Bluewater shopping centre in Kent hosted a series of boxing matches on Saturday 13th October, in the complex's new Glow Arena. The event was headlined and topped off by James DeGale's defence of his EBU Super Middleweight title and so I took up my ringside position for the evening, and tried to remember how to shoot the sport.

I've only shot amateur boxing until now, in gloomy school sports halls, so this televised event meant that there was actually some decent lighting...

Here's a picture from a fight earlier in the evening, with local boxer Adam Dinsdale, from Hoo, up against Ibrar Riyaz.

Adam Dinsdale, right, from Hoo, Kent, on his way to beating Ibrar Riyaz in this lightweight bout.
Nikon D3S, 1/640th @ f4,  24-70 f2.8AFS at 70mm, 2500ISO.

More pics to follow in a few days.

Summer of Sport, Pt 2...

Or, " You shall go to the Olympics..!"

OK, I confess to being something of an Olympo-sceptic on the build-up to London 2012.

Various ministers trying to claim the event was under-budget, the seemingly totalitarian powers granted to LOCOG, the enforcement of Olympic branding restrictions to a stupid degree (Little Chef's Olympic Breakfast, available for many years, for heaven's sake!), latterly even the abject failure of private company G4S to understand what it needed to do to fulfil it's contracted security commitments...

I thought the Torch Relay around the UK was over-egged, but sitting on the back of the media bus showed me that plenty of people were really looking forward to the event, and my mood began to shift.

Then there was Danny Boyle's truly wonderful opening ceremony, Jacques Rogge's very generous opening speech, the Queen and 007 "parachuting" into the show and suddenly it was clear the bulls**t had stopped and London 2012 was going to be fantastic. Even the weather, pretty dire through spring and summer, largely cooperated!

And the medals started to come. Women's events are the biggest growth area of sport and  fittingly it was the Team GB women who put the first ones on the board, with Lizzie Armitstead's cycling silver and Becky Adlington's swimming bronze. Then rowers Heather Stanning and Helen Glover won the coxless pairs for the first GB gold. The men stepped up, and Team GB ended in third place in the medal table, remarkable for a tiny island with a (still) relatively small population.

Then it was the turn of the Paralympians to take the stage.

And here, I actually got to see some London 2012 action, when I hadn't been expecting to do so...

More after the break.

Tuesday free practice, D3S plus 300 f2,8 and TC14EII (=420mm), pretty much the combination used for most of
my time, unless it was a close-in shot or obviously a wide angle view.

Summer of Sport, Pt. 1

Every year, there is an event called the British Transplant Games, where those who have undergone transplant surgery take part in sporting events as a celebration of the life that's been given to them by medicine.

This year, with London 2012 hitting the headlines and keying the nation up for sport, Medway hosted the transplant games based around Medway Park in Gillingham, slotted in between the Olympics and the Paralympics at the end of August.

It would be wrong to say that this was high calibre competition, even if many were willing to approach the games seriously. Indeed, many were still clearly unwell from their traumas. It was probably best described as a Hospitals' Sports Day.

But as I said, when you think that many of those taking part owed their lives to the transplant they had undergone, then it was a great celebration of new life.

Sadly, the biggest disappointment was a near-complete lack of interest on behalf of the national media. On the two days I was there, there was no sign of any other photographer except me, and the games' own...

Maisie Danher, 7, in the Children's Obstacle Race.
Nikon D3S, 300mm f2.8 + TC14EII (= 420mm), 1/500th f4.0, 8000 ISO.
Thank heavens for D3S. Medway Park is not *cough* the brightest of venues, though at least the lights are
"simple" for colour temperature. Who thought painting the walls lurid "hospital green"
(thanks, T, for that description!) was a good idea, though...?