The Joy of Victory

Photo of the Day

Yesterday I travelled with the Lafayette Brawlin’ Dolls to their first bout of the season in Marion, Illinois. It was a long bus trip, but it was well worth the trip. LBD faced the Southern Illinois Roller Girls. The bout was held at The Pavillion of the City of Marion. This is a beautiful venue that impressed me right off of the bat. Traveling with the team we arrived very early to the venue so we got a chance to see some of Marion, Illinois. Actually we were just able to check out the mall. I will have more about that in a future post. LBD really started their season off strong in the first half jumping out to a 117-39 lead. That run was fueled by some power jams that LBD really took care of. Team captain Sugar Magnolia had the jam of the night scoring 30 points in one jam. That meant that she passed the entire pack seven times in the two minute jam. That is just four points shy of the WFTDA record. The second half saw the game change completely as Southern Illinois made a run to cut the lead down to where one good jam could mean the difference. In the end LBD won starting the season off right. The picture above was taken just after the win as the players were celebrating. A year ago I was just finding roller derby. Now I find myself right in the middle of it. It is a good place to be.

Technical Data

The venue had very good lighting, but I still needed to have my ISO up at 6400 for most of the bout. Near the end I put on both of my wide angle lenses to try some things. Here I had my 10-24mm on to get some reactions. I found that I really needed to be accurate with this lens or the distortion was too much. Here I got the exact shot that I was looking for. Actually one player made the shot for me. I tried this a few seconds before, and something looked flat on my LCD screen. I put the camera up to try again just as #411 Get Shorty raised her fist in victory. I think that a simple gesture really made this shot. I used the light sports gameday preset by Matt Kloskowski here to get the look that I wanted with a few minor tweaks to the sliders to get it exactly where it should be. The slow shutter speed allowed for a slight blur that I think added some emotion to the photo.

More Bout Pictures

You can find more pictures from the bout last night on my Facebook page here. I don’t like what the social network does to my image quality, but it does make for very easy sharing.

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