| Joined: | Wed Apr 11th, 2012 |
| Location: | Melbourne, Australia |
| Posts: | 525 |
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Well I made a lot of friends who discovered on the way that I was into photography. The official photos from the night were disappointing. A lot were badly out of focus and a lot were obscured by the ropes. They asked me if I would shoot this match for them. I felt I could do a better job than the last guy (despite lack of experience in this) and decided to back myself and say yes.
The deal is that you shoot the match and make the photos available for sale. As I do not do this for a living and the night was a charity event for Legacy (which helps the families of service men lost overseas) I decided that I would do this, but I would donate any money made to Legacy. I also wanted to make it easy for people to get their photos so put them up at the bargain price of $4. This seems to have worked as they went up midday yesterday and I have $318 in sales already.
I didn't want to bother with prints so I decided digital download and web portal was the way to go. To do this I purchased three products from http://theturninggate.net which allowed me to fully create a nice PHP and database driven website almost entirely from Lightroom, and managing the web once set up from Lightroom's Publisher which is a snip. I'm going to write a separate topic on this as it might interest anyone who wants a web site - even without the e-commerce part.
Jac (my wife) also came with me and did shots of the spectators, couples shots etc. She used the D7000 with an SB800 on it and my 18-200mm lens.
I shot the fights with my D3s and 24-70mm f2.8 lens. I learnt a hell of a lot as the night progressed, there is no doubt that I did better in the later fights, but everyone seems happy with the shots I have published (including the earlier fights).
What changed as I learnt:
I always shoot in Aperture. Well with the lights the exposure was all over the place and I was shooting Jpg for buffer speed purposes so I quickly moved into manual mode (after about 6 shots).
I started at 1/640 but moved up to 1/1000 to better freeze the action.
Even at high burst you miss the perfect moment, by trying to time the sequence to start at that point I caught it more often, though still not enough
Early on I was wimping out and not filling the frame (because this is hard!) I started cropping in much closer and using the AFon button to track focus and got some better shots (a lot of early ones got cropped n Post later, later shots were much closer)
I managed to get some bubble wrap from the interval charity auction to kneel on for the second half - knee pads would be a great idea!
Not to block the TV camera from the balcony (I think if I hadn't learnt this promptly and immediately at first request I would have been thrown out!)
Overall I was pretty please with how it went, but would love some constructive criticism. My ability to execute said advice might be limited, but I have had a couple of people say they are going to ask me to do other events, including a ladies Water Polo match - anybody ever done that?
I'm going to post a couple of shots in the thread below, but please check out the web page:
http://richwhetton.com/EFC6photography/