20 Apr Shoot In The Octagon
There is on-location work and then there is on-location work. The bigger the challenge the more I love it, whether that is challenges with the composition, lighting, or time allotted for the shoot. Walking into a never-before-seen situation on top of a very limited time window, all while conducting the shoot in front of a crowd is… fun! This was the situation last week for a packed MMA event in Tacoma.
Smokin’ Hot Espresso, one of my regular business clients, were one of the sponsors, and some of the baristas were the ring girls. I’ll usually attend their events to document the occasion, however, this time I wanted to do something a little more fun. There is an octagon in the middle of this place, and how often to do you get the chance to hold your own personal photo shoot in one of them? This was my thinking anyway, so I had the girls show up an hour early to do a quick shoot.
We got into the cage shortly before the doors opened for the crowd, and as we started shooting, hundreds of people flooded in for their seats. I’d guess that they had seating for a thousand in there. I had to think in terms of fast, easy, and lightweight, so that I could walk-in, setup quick, work and make adjustments fast, and teardown so we can get out of the cage before the fighters needed to do some warming up. More or less, we had about 30 minutes to do our thing. This was a job for my hot shoe flashes. No cables, aka no tripping hazards, and they were fast and easy. They provided just enough light power to produce the images I was looking for. All of the images you see here were created with a two hot shoe flash setup.
I had the girls put on their fight faces…
I love the way the light etches out the fencing, as well as the fence shadowing cast by the backlight.
30 minutes in and out of the ring, all the while our viewing crowd growing in the background. It was a fun, unique shoot, that’s for sure!