I've shot boxing events before here and a couple of weeks ago I was asked to do so again. After shooting the event, I also happened to acquire a very interesting instructional video on making black and white images from the very talented Ming Thein. While I have only just begun to digest it all (it is both long and detailed and needs repeated viewings), I wanted to start putting it into practice right away. Without wishing to sound like a shill, his videos are excellent and really get you thinking about making good photographs.

Anyway, enough of the proselytizing. Twenty shots from the boxing event, rendered as black and whites. You'll likely notice noise and other weird things going on in some of these. That's because the shooting conditions were horrible. It was not a well lit place, there were spotlights pointing directly at the ring, and they frequently threw my metering way off, giving me a massively underexposed file. It's to the credit of the D600 and Photoshop / ACR that many shots were recoverable even though they were almost pitch black out of camera.

Here we go then.

Setting up the ring

Not a bad turnout for a small scale event.

I made an error of judgment in the first fight. I went up to the balcony to shoot, but the light was so bad that even at ISO 4000 I wasn't getting enough shutter speed to freeze the action properly. Only a couple of shots from that first fight were worthwhile . This is one of them.

And this is the other

From the second fight onwards, I stayed near the ring and got up close and personal. Made for a rather uniform look, but the balcony just wasn't an option.

Knockdown. Note the blur; the camera metered this one OK but as a result the shutter speed wasn't very high.

After a second knockdown...

...the referee called it off.

In a somewhat different vein, the next entry will probably be the pretty-much-obligatory sakura (cherry blossom) post for the year. The weather's been pretty bad, but I still had a few opportunities to get out and shoot them.

We are also creeping up on ten thousand viewers in total, and once we get there I have a somewhat special post planned.

Watch this space...and thanks for looking!