Wrestling...

...as I started to say elsewhere, is an interesting sport to shoot.

There's long periods of relative inactivity that are very subtle isometric battles, and then suddenly there's a burst of real motion as the balance of power shifts.

Combine that with the fact that there's a whole lot going on all at one: at the Rock Island Tournament they start out with three mats going at once, and this year (to kinda move things along..) they did the finals matches on two mats, simultaneously.

My best angle is right on the floor, on my knees (wearing my old volleyball kneepads) just inside the ropes that mark off the aisles from the mats.

So the backgrounds are incredibly busy: I'm shooting straight across the mat with the opposite bleachers in the immediate background.

There's a kind of Bruegel's-Fall-of-Icarus atmosphere about the whole thing: there's this titanic struggle going on out on the mat all the while a whole bunch of people are doing other stuff right beyond, seemingly oblivious to what's going on right in front of them.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens at 75mm; image stabilization on; AI Focus auto-focus; ISO 6400; white balance "fluorescent"; hand-held; manual exposure of 250th second at f5.6.

Now up...

Rockbusters Wrestlers 2009, both the wrestler and the team photos..

These came out pretty well, all things considered, that being that they're shot under duress.

Duress being that the coaches want to get this over with as quickly as possible, that I'm working in a small space with 50+ 6- to 11-year-old wrestlers, that there's only enough room for one strobe, and that the floors and lower walls are dark green or a kind of yellow-gold, while the upper walls and the ceilings are yellow-gold (see the Team photos to see what I mean) and the existing lighting are fluorescents that are about nine feet overhead.

Shot with my new EOS 5D Mark II; ISO 200; white balance 5600K to match the single Alien Bees AB800 strobe that was fired into a 60" softbox mounted on a light stand at about chest height; manual exposure at a 60th at f8.0; the strobe is just off my right shoulder and about 10 feet from the subjects for the wrestler shots, and dead-center and back about 18-20 feet for the team shots.

For the wrestler shots the softbox was turned to portrait; for the team shots the softbox was rotated over to landscape and aimed somewhat up at the ceiling.