the no-gi/sumo nationals
the 16th of april, 2022
Apollo Sports Centre, Bucharest
pretending to shoot sports with a 24-70
whoah.
my experience of shooting sports (or fast paced events more broadly) is very limited. i did cover a few lacrosse matches back when i had just graduated, but that’s where it stopped.
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to cover that particular match, corners had to be cut - i could only use a canon eos 5d mk. i, coupled with a 4gb cf card and a sigma 150-600. needless to say, shooting raw was off the table. i elected to shoot compressed, with a neutral picture profile, managing to salvage a bit of dynamic range. yet the lesson of that day was to trust my knowledge and experience - the results were unexpectedly favourable and little editing had to go into the final set.
in other words, i’m pretty bad at it, but have always wanted to get a little better.
i came to be a spectator for the event at the request of members of my sports club. i had been asked whether i’d be there to offer my moral support - i took it one step further and offered to photograph the event.
to my surprise, i was one of the few, if not the only person with a camera. i walked behind the tatamis, an area far less crowded.
i would walk around the referee tables, right by the banners reading “KEMPO.” this is just a photo of the hall someone took using their phone, but, based on the postprocessing the pic received, it should already be apparent just how poorly lit the venue was.
challenges
zoom range
due to the untimely demise of the autofocusing motor on my 70-200/2.8, i’ve had to settle for whatever other lenses i had left. i’d slimmed down my kit quite a bit, which meant that the only viable option left was my nikon af-s 24-70 f/2.8G ed. the pace of action in grappling can go from incredibly slow to lightning-fast in a matter of seconds - this is where the relatively fast autofocus played its part. combatants also change positions often, making the wide end of the lens particularly useful when the action progresses towards the edge of the tatami. it should be noted however that as useful as the wide end is, the tele end proved to be a little shorter than i would have hoped. to mitigate this shortcoming, i sought to include other elements into the composition, such as the coaches in the background or the referee.
70mm: a remarkably hands-on attitude on part of the referees.
still, this did not quite contribute to the goal i had set for the entire exercise - to cover the development of a sporting event, with a focus on the action. flavour (and certainly, context) would be welcome, i thought, but in no way would it be the highlight.
i found that the 24-70 did a reasonable job at blurring out otherwise busy backgrounds, particularly at 70mm. the nikon 24-70 af-s is nothing to write home about wide open, yet f/2.8 was still a good option in terms of background blur (and with it, perceived sharpness of in-focus subjects) and the shutter speed it allowed for.
i could have easily used a more flexible lens - the focal range on my sony pz 18-200 would have been excellent to this end. however, poor lighting conditions would have had me push the iso of my a6000 beyond the limits of usability.
light flicker
i’ve always thought flicker is either visible or it isn’t, in accordance with the photographer’s choice of shutter speed. turns out it’s a little more complicated than that.
both of these were taken under the exact same settings. the flicker is most obvious on the mats, where the second frame is brighter. note: these two shots did not make the cut.
fortunately, the exposure variation is easily fixed in post, at virtually no cost of quality.
motion blur
as previously touched upon, things can change rapidly during a grappling match. i thought a shutter speed of 1/200 would suffice, yet that wasn’t always the case.
1/200 - barely sufficient.
a faster shutter speed of at least 1/500 would have been preferable. this would have meant a wider aperture or an iso value of at least 6400, which, to my mind, is too far into noise territory. at the end of the day, it still remains an open question to me - does a better capture trump digital noise? - in the context of shooting for social media, i am inclined to believe so.
angle
having found that fighters often change placement on the tatami, i once again claim a 70-200/2.8 would have been a better choice. to prevent photographing a faceless tangle of limbs, i often had to step away from the pile, along the tatami. by the time i would secure a feasible angle, i would have already walked beyond the longer end of the 24-70. in essence, i’d be too far away to make the shot count.
for those adept at combat sports, this may in fact have some scientific value. for the average viewer, however, i suspect it would be an uninteresting shot.
in effect, i built the composition using background elements, yet for the purpose of the shoot, these would amount to a visually crowded photo, with unnecessary detail.
another minor challenge posed by the setting had to do with the referees - usually unobtrusive, i found that referees often have to jump in on the action and closely observe whatever is going on. not an issue in and of itself, yet the sight of severed, seemingly hovering legs is little short of disturbing. equally, the neon orange garb of referees can have more visual salience than the fighters themselves. as such, i found myself (often unsuccessfully) attempting to predict referees’ movements, adding a layer of complexity to the shoot.
knowledge of the sport
as a novice grappler, i do have some notion of what to expect from a match. i’m still unsure what makes for a genuinely “good” moment in grappling, yet this is something i aim to improve over time, as my own abilities develop further.
achievements
i’m not entirely unhappy with my coverage of the event. as i had not photographed an event in a while, let alone an event of this kind, i was sure to manage expectations and volunteered to do it in the capacity of a “guy who happens to own a camera.” not many shots stand out, yet the set strikes me as consistent and reasonably thorough.
not only that, but my experience of shooting events certainly came into play. i had taken it upon myself to cover the matches of members of my own club. this ended up being a matter of following commentator announcements, as well as juggling overlapping matches.
while i had to give up on about half of the frames i took, this was a side effect of the pace of the action, not necessarily user error. editing has been equally forgiving - as visually crowded as some images ended up being, i had no trouble “reverse-engineering” the coordinates of my composition, keeping cropping to a minimum.
editing
aside from lightroom’s built-in profile corrections, little in terms of editing has been added to the images.
for some frames i have selectively salvaged hot highlights, while others i have cropped into. for events, however, i prefer lively, high key results, which meant carefully balancing the vitality of the highlights with the depth of the blacks. not easily achieved - the tatamis are much more reflective than it would seem, while the flicker situation made it hard to achieve consistency in the background (where lighting conditions were, by and large, constant).
right: those highlights are absolutely cooked; pulling them down (as seen on the left), however, gives whites an ugly, dirty look. worth the compromise, i would say.
the frame on the right: the exposure is down by 0.3 stops. can anyone really tell? heavy noise and tired focus aside, it appears to me like there’s more detail in the skin.
the d750 is fairly noisy at iso 3200 (yet not disastrously so), which had to be mitigated with a bit of noise reduction. my poor focusing accuracy made it even more difficult to save sharpness (and face) at times, but oversharpening would have, in my mind, made a total mess of otherwise usable shots.
perhaps more could have been done with appropriate sharpening in post: the image of the left has received a bit of noise reduction and a tiny bit of digital sharpening. but i doubt there’s much more to be done about motion blur and inaccurate focusing.
not much else to tell in terms of editing: for this one, i focused on “getting it right from the get go.” that has not necessarily been the case, but i wasn’t going to try to hide the quality of the raw material with colour grading.
conclusions
having taken a few shots at a private event last month, i thought i would love to get back into the event game. happily, i no longer peg my income to photography, which means that my reputation alone would be at stake. opportunities have in fact arisen, with the present event and a tournament on may the 7th.
i won’t call it a “revival” of my professional photographic endeavours - lots of work will have to go into this before i can call it professional again. in all fairness, i used to get better results with far worse gear. instead, i see it as a contribution to a community which appears to have little visibility and few professionals (or alternatively, experienced dilettantes like myself) invested in covering its events.
