the k1 gala

the 7th of may, 2022

Rapid Sports Hall, Bucharest

shooting sports with a 24-70 again… and making it work

that hall had a vibe of its own - the air was musky, humid, hotter than the sub Saharan rainforest, and rife with tension. between the four fighting rings which had been put together, two looked like actual boxing rings, while the others were nothing but vaguely delineated tatamis. it occurred to me that the 400 contestants i’d heard about ahead of the event had actually turned into over 500, which made it hard to believe that everyone would get a chance at facing off in one of the rings without cutting some serious corners. upsettingly, i was right - the lads from my club, as slightly older amateurs or budding professionals, hit the tatamis late at night, some around 20:00, or around the time i left (21:30?). or even later.

from an outsider’s point of view, the otherwise massive event was plagued by logistical obstacles. an hour or two into the afternoon, when the sweltering heat of the sports hall reached unprecedented levels (to a point where the air under the tall metal ceilings almost felt tangible and my freshly-resurrected 70-200 decided it wasn’t going to cooperate, yet again), 11 to 13 year-old amateurs were still duking it out, probably across all four rings. i’d guess that’s when it sank in that it would take much, much longer than anticipated before we’d see any of our men fight. for myself too it felt a little unfair - i’d done my duty and had shown up way ahead of everyone else, a little before 10am, in hopes of setting up and getting a feel for the event.

*the hall around lunchtime. shot with the nikkor 20/1.8 AF-S at a cool iso 1000.*

some claimed the event had started off with fighters getting two (two-minute?) rounds in the ring, only to have that slashed in half by noon. the number of rounds would have gotten kicked back up to three as older, more seasoned fighters hit the rings in the evening. nonetheless, this is all hearsay; in an effort to focus on the experience of it all, i preferred to look the other way.

bashing aside, the event was huge. certainly, it did not have the etiquette and arguably, the class (whatever that may mean) of the grappling nationals, but tensions were at an all time high. some of the contestants came off as particularly accomplished sportsmen, even at a very young age, which unquestionably sparked the admiration of twenty-something year-old me. make no mistake, this applied to contestants of all genders, not just the (frighteningly) gigantic 16-year-olds warming up by the bleachers.

tensions certainly peaked for me when the first combatant from our club got called in. our coach and a friend of our first fighter (a member of our club too) walked into the exclusive area with him, with me tagging along to document whatever was happening. truly, i had not seen such focus and determination in a young man’s eyes and the coach was sure to harness that energy. talking to him closely, the coach pepped him up to the brink of overstimulation and i knew our first contestant would walk into the ring very motivated.

he did well.

but i felt exhausted after that first match - i’d vicariously been part of it, though out of admiration, i only admitted it to the rest of my team much later.

yet that would be a remote episode, as fatigue would make me a little less sensitive to the rest of the event. other notable happenings included a particularly riveting talk on religious spirituality with a colleague i found out had graduated theology (who, after our chat, proceeded to absolutely destroy both his opponents), as well as witnessing one of the boys win by effectively popping his opponent’s shoulder out (and looking absolutely shell shocked afterwards).

*an impressive feat of strength: the look of a man who has defeated both his opponents. note - the blood isn’t his.*

as exciting as the entire affair has been, i shan’t forget it was all in the name of photography and the event brought on a fresh set of challenges, a few of which are detailed over the following.

challenges

lighting

though i couldn’t be happier about the absence of artificial light flicker across the hall, their intensity still proved deceptive. building upon the concluding questions of my previous post, i wanted ideal exposure and perceived sharpness, no matter the toll that would take on the dynamic range and levels of noise. i switched to 12-bit raws in order to save a bit of space (as opposed to 14-bit raws), as all that extra information is wasted at higher iso sensitivities anyway. this time, i went with a fast shutter speed of 1/400 and an iso of 6400, values which quite frankly posed more issues than they solved.

*a minimal, yet present amount of blur, even at 1/400.*

light varied wildly between sections of the hall and i often ended up with properly exposed subjects, but with visibly toasty highlights in the background. certainly, the reflective properties of surfaces play a central role in what they may look like on camera and using automatic exposure would have probably dealt with any unwanted whites a little better, but using nikon’s highlight-weighted metering mode may have darkened up the rest of my frame a little too much. at ISO 6400, you’d probably like for your exposure to be as close to perfect as possible.

*not too eye-catching, but the highlights are nowhere near ideal exposure.*

to my dismay, shutter speed once again proved to be an issue - at 1/400 of a second, a lot of the action still appears blurred. the lesson here is that you probably want to go around 1/800 for fast-paced action like this, yet to achieve that without absolutely crushing image quality, you’d have to work with very wide apertures. this, in turn, generates a wholly different set of difficulties, the chief of which can be summarised under…

… focus

the “golden trinity” of nikon pro-grade lenses is, i would argue, a very impressive feat of engineering. it is the coronation of tens of years of r&d and i will be as bold as to claim that most pro-grade nikkor lenses released after 2000, coupled with a d700 or more recent full-frame body, could easily be a “forever” gear combo for most prosumer, perhaps even some professional photographers.

in the words of Jeb Inge on Casual Photophile,
The Nikon D700 does 98 percent of what 99 percent of us actually need. And it does it for ten percent of the cost of cameras that provide the other two percent. I’ll never sell my D700, and not only because I’ll never get back what the camera’s worth. I have no doubt that this camera will keep clicking for many years to come. And unless I suddenly turn into a completely different photographer, there will always be a need for it in my camera bag.
this speaks volumes to me. as someone who has always been particularly unlucky (or just plain stupid) with building a proper gear kit, i have come to realise that with my purchase of Nikon’s “golden trinity” and close to a full set of af-s primes, i no longer catch myself swooning over better lenses or cameras. for once, my abilities are no longer limited (or perhaps challenged) by my kit and i’m delighted to be able to access a tool for almost any use case scenario.
equally, with dslrs on their way out (apparently, at least - i have no way of knowing what Big Camera is scheming behind closed doors in Japan), i see pretty much any camera released after the d750 as a variant of a mature, almost perfect design. unquestionably, the d850 may have a high enough megapixel count to be more future proof than my d750 or someone else’s d810, but i just can’t see any of these cameras struggling with the same design and image quality flaws as the, say, D90 did years ago. in other words, almost any photographer (unless we’re talking niche applications or those practitioners who genuinely need 100mp Phase One cameras) has access to an almost level playing field with just about any modern dslr and a decent, properly chosen set of lenses.
as i type all this on my 2012 macbook pro, i’d like to offer that a discussion of mature designs may be in order, but i’ll leave that one for another time.

nevertheless, they’re not flawless, in part due to their fundamental condition of being polycarbonate and metal barrels with glass inside, and this is obvious in behaviour and image quality.

my newly serviced 70-200 took a break yet again, after a two-hour streak of absolutely crushing it. an impressively savvy gentleman at a local optical gear service explained this would have not been unusual for just about any lens, as the extreme heat and humidity in the hall had likely puffed up a foam ring inside my 70-200. this foam ring is present in numerous modern lens designs and it should not come as a surprise that my thrice-operated workhorse gave up in one of the most lens-unfriendly environments i’m likely to ever use it in.

my second best soldier, the 24-70, came to the rescue yet again, performing admirably throughout the event.

however, both lenses only perform reasonably (in absolute image quality terms) at f/2.8, but that’s it. just reasonably. the loss of contrast, somewhat clumsy edges, and soft corners did the (contextually) slow shutter speed no favours and i found myself doing hard work in post.

with the pace of most fights, the depth of field at f/2.8 proved to be a challenge in its own right, meaning i simply couldn’t work with most images which were even slightly out of focus.

*slightly out of focus: this one is still one of the salvageable images.*

on this occasion, prime lenses would have done better to freeze the action, but the fast shutter speed, (arguably) comparable focus speed, and fixed focal length would have probably done more to reduce my success rate.

fear of missing out

not knowing what to expect from the event, i adopted an unproductive “shoot now, think later” attitude. granted, the tension had gotten to me, but with all the years of photography under my belt, i should have known better. the fear of missing out clearly got the best of me on this occasion and my success rate dipped below 50%. in other words, a little less than half of the images i took were useful, which isn’t optimal at all.

a key takeaway here would be to really hold on to the practice of composing first, observing keenly, and anticipating movement rather than blasting the shutter button. the action is unlikely to elude you if you’re genuinely focused. this may only be partially true for a fast-paced kickboxing match, but further development is in order.

one more thing - though it may go against the principles of some professionals, checking the lcd often, particularly when getting to grips with the conditions of a shoot, can hardly be classified as sinful. i don’t think I’ve checked the lcd of my camera more than thrice over the course of my colleagues’ fights. a gentleman who had likely been hired as the official photographer of the event shot his vastly faster z-series + 24-70 combo on manual focus, which effectively proves both points: monitor the lcd and anticipate the action.

achievements

perhaps imperfect from a technical standpoint, my coverage of the K1 gala has done a little better in respect to subject matter. building upon a key lesson learned during the previous sports competition i covered, i wanted for the set to be interesting to an audience beyond a relatively small community of sportspeople.

focusing on pre-match tensions, as well as the prep and aftermath, the set presents, in my view, a more detailed look at amateur sports tournaments.

it also comes a little closer to my own vision of what proper, (somewhat) substantive photo coverage should be - showcasing a range of emotions, social phenomena, or other interesting tidbits in addition to the run of the mill, highly technical sports coverage.

*going beyond kicks and punches and showcasing emotion.*

moreover, ironically or not, standing in that impromptu sauna for 11 hours is an achievement in and of itself.

editing

i’d be telling lies if i said any interesting procedures went into the making of this set. there was a lot of sorting involved, along with a bit of cropping. equally, i applied a white balance profile across the batch, in order to emulate the actual colour of the light during the event. just like before, a bit of effort went into salvaging blown out highlights, but that’s a bit of a lost cause at iso6400. More notably, i added a bit of dehaze across all shots, in order to compensate for 24-70’s misty performance wide open.

i have exported the images at a cool 3.7mp/100ppi. compared to the d750’s 24mp output, this is tiny. nonetheless, this only goes to show how poorly that generation of cameras handled high isos; equally, blessed be the web, where crustily compressed .jpegs still have a place.

conclusions

no deep insights here, i’m afraid.

nonetheless, one thing to note is the importance of practice… in a field where there are few opportunities to engage in it. exposure, for instance, is nothing but the result of a few simple mathematical operations (on the user’s end, that is), yet it takes a completely different set of criteria to evaluate the quality of a shot: the amount of grain relative to contrast, colour rendition under artificial lights, the aesthetic effect of motion blur, or, last but not least, the emotional charge of an image. practice educates the user of a camera in terms of how to fulfill all of these coordinates, yet i don’t see myself gaining access to too many boxing competitions over the coming months.

at the end of the day, every drop of experience needs to be capitalised on and i honestly couldn’t be happier i offered to shoot this particular event.