I remember watching a video made by Chase Jarvis about a photo shoot he did for a client. He shot hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures and then mentioned that only a handful of them would be used in the campaign. I thought he was exaggerating, but he wasn't.

A few months ago I was asked to shoot a boxing event, which I did. The results are in the "Boxfight"  gallery on the main site. I shot the event and pretty much forgot about it. Then, a few weeks ago, I got a call from the event organiser, mentioning that they were coming down to Nagoya again and did I happen to be free? I welcome any chance to shoot, so I agreed. This time, though, there were thirteen fights rather than seven. I banked on taking quite a few shots.

In the end, I took some 1,300 shots, which works out at 100 shots per fight. Some fewer (the first fight was literally over with the first punch), and some more, but it averages out to 100. 

The real herculean task was, of course, the editing. I figured that at least half the shots would be instant deletes, another chunk would be unacceptable due to blur, poor framing or something else. That left me with what I was going to send the organiser. In the end, I sent him 379 shots, which is not a bad hit rate.

Needless to say I'm not going to stick them all here. They can be found in the "Boxfight 2" section on the main site. As an exercise in self-editing, I'm going to try and pick the best two shots from each fight and then try to refine them further (if I think they need it), either by black and white conversion Colour Efex Pro, Lightroom or something similar.

Fight one was pretty short. In fact it lasted essentially for one punch and the referee stopped it. So choosing two shots from that one was not hard.

The punch that began (and ended) the fight:

Referee says "that's enough of that"

That was easy enough. Fight two:

I had more or less carte blanche in that I could go anywhere and shoot from anywhere as long as I didn't block the view of the paying spectators. So I was allowed to literally stick the camera in between the ropes and shoot close up. This was an interesting angle.

Fight 3

There's noise in the shadows, but when you're editing a thousand shots you don't really want to send each and every one through a postprocessing frenzy.

End of fight.

Fight 4

Those spotlights were both a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that they could really add to the overall atmosphere of a shot, and a curse in that they could royally screw up your metering, causing a great action shot to be massively underexposed. In this case, they helped rather than hindered.

Fight 5:

Fight 6

Fight 7

One thing I learned from this...de-noising each and every picture isn't an option if you're doing everything on your own. So the noise stays.

Fight 8

Fight 9

I was starting to get tired here, so this was the worst fight in terms of decent shots. These were almost literally the only two half decent shots from the fight.

Fight 10

I got a second wind here, so to speak. For some reason the shots from this fight turned out nicely.

Fight 11

This was a tough one to choose 2 shots from. I got a lot of nice ones here.

Fight 12

Final fight

The editing took longer than the shooting, but all in all an enjoyable experience.

Thanks for looking!