Trying to Find a Dark Venue to Try Out the Camera

It is rare that I seek out bad situations to shoot in, but lately I have been. I really want to see what this camera can do. When I poked my head into Holloway Gymnasium I thought that I found that great dark venue to try it out in. It was dark, but the lighting on the wrestlers was not too bad. They also got a decent bounce off of the mat to get rid of some shadows. At the end of the day I was not happy with my test, and I knew that I would have to wait a week to try it out during a roller derby bout. Of course that is the real test is shooting under the variable low light of roller derby. I may hold off my review of the camera until I shoot a bout with it. Right now though everything that you see is also a jpeg. Lightroom will not convert my RAW files yet, and I don’t feel like adding to my workflow. At ISO 4000 the camera is holding up well here.

Shooting Wrestling

I have a confession to make. I had never seen a real wrestling match before let alone shot one. I had no idea what to expect or where to shoot from. I decided to go high early to make a graphic photo that I saw when I walked in the gym. It did not work out exactly as I had planned, but it is not bad. From there though I watched a bit of the action to see what I would want to shoot. It was from a point very high that I realized that I had to be as low as possible. I went and sat on the sidelines, and quickly found out that sitting wasn’t low enough. By the end of the match that I shot I was on my belly shooting. From that position I made some of the photos that I really liked. I would have liked to have stayed longer, but I had to be somewhere. I would like to shoot more wrestling in the future though as it made for some different photos. For this experiment everything down on the floor was shot with the 300mm lens on the 7D. That gave me a focal length of 480mm once you factor in the 1.6x crop factor. In a perfect world I would also have my 70-200mm or the 24-70mm on my full frame camera with me to pan out a bit. I wanted some detail though, and I think that the 300mm was the way to go here.

Bonus Photos

Below are a few photos that I made early on. Like any sport though what I think is a good photo during my first few shoots will probably not be good to me down the road. That is the fun of photography though is to constantly improve yourself. Here are a few that I hope to improve on.