The weekend saw us cover boxing for the first time. A rather late booking, with just a weeks notice, with a remit to cover six charity bouts at the KC Stadium in Hull. The organiser had been given our details on a recommendation by an existing customer. He had allegedly been let down on previous occasions by other alleged professionals. Why someone would agree a fee and then not turn up still bemuses me. The evening went smoothly, without incident and we were paid, in full, before we left.
Whilst covering any sport is no problem for us the usual challenge is adequate lighting and this event proved no different. The room itself was huge and yet lit with nothing more than low wattage lighting. With a good % of this lighting not working it would have been beneficial to have taken half a dozen candles to ringside to double the rooms lumens output.
As with most sport photography, freezing the action is what provides the marketable/sellable image. My son and I had thrown a few mock air moves, to set up the cameras, and found that anything under 1/500th sec simply blurred. Our problem was that our 5Diii’s were bottoming out at f/2.8, 1/400th at ISO 12,000 with the 24-70 and 70-200mm we expected to use. Luckily we have a 50mm f/1.2 in our arsenal of lenses which gave at least one of us a fighting chance. At f/2 we hit an ISO of 5000 and at f/1.2 4000. The f/1.2 made things a little tricky if anything moved off the narrow focus plane and so the f/2 was used because of the negligibility in ISO quality. Whilst this denied my son the flexibility of a zoom the images would be of a better quality. I decided to fight with the 24-70 f/2.8 and adjust the underexposed images in PP.
This was certainly an event to push us technically yet without such challenges life could and would be boring.
One of the images from the evening is below.
Cecil Paul Studios 