Muay Thai - Jordan
I don't know why every attempt to revive this group goes down the drains. Although its by photog to photogs, but I've seen the group in and out of ICU quite few times.
Well, here's my attempt, being a photographer for 4 years, specializing in commercial and advertising work, I also do a lot of personal work to grow my experience, and feed the passion. I seem to be gravitating towards extreme action recently, maybe because of the unpredictable nature of it, you know, crazy people doing crazy stuff while you hold your camera; how much more fun can you ask for ?
I will start sharing my some of work and experiment here, and shed light on the techniques that was used to capture the photos, hopefully this will engage photogs and put some life back into the group. Being a gear geek, with a constant hunger over photo techniques and how-to's, I thought this might be the missing piece of the puzzle from this group. Let's see....
Anyways... having spent most of the summer vacation in Jordan, I ended up arranging for 2 large portfolio shoots (i thought I have lots's a free time, but ended up with 2 more commercial shoots, talk about time management !). Anyways one of the shoots was at a local Muay Thai (Thai Boxing) club in Jordan. The guys at the club were amazing and we had a blast producing the photos.
As far as the lighting was concerned; I ended up using 3 flashes (2 Nikon Sb-800's), and 1 Vivitar 285vh (may it rest in piece now, it got blown in a later shoot). The 2 sb800's were put on both sides of the room, at the back, pointed at the center, where the fighters would be, the flashes were bare (no brolly or softbox), and zoomed all the way to 80mm. I used them to give edge lighting to the fighters. The vivitar was at the front and shot through a white umbrella to give some fill light (Yes, the key was the edge/rim light). This arrangement gives the best edgy look (in my opinion) to high-action shots. 1 flash was fired through a pocketWizard (a very dependable wireless remote), and the rest of the flashes were fired as optical slaves (they go when they 'see' other flashes go). As for my camera settings, they varied, but I was mostly around f5 (to allow for a decent depth of field as it was not the time for blurred backgrounds), shutter speeds between 1/160 to 1/200 to eliminate any ambient light (neon lights for ex.) to affect my photos, i wanted my photos to be lit by flashes only. My ISO was at 200, which is my standard shooting value most of the time.
Without further blabber, here's the result;
You can see one of the sb800 flashes right flanking the fighters in photos 2 and 4. I didn't retouch it away for you to see how it was setup.
Ideas and comments are welcome. I hope you enjoyed reading this post as much as I did writing it. I am always looking to expand my portfolio with action projects, and it would be great if I get some cool ideas from you guys.
Tks.
