Photography Challenge - Shooting Boxing Match

I had the opportunity to shoot a Muay Thai boxing match my friend Jon organized last weekend.  It was a great opportunity and challenge any photographer would benefit from.  It really is hard to think of more challenging circumstances to shoot in – very low light, very fast action and no flash.  The standard for boxing match is no flash as it is likely to distract the boxers, although many audience members don’t have the forethought or etiquette to follow this. 

It was my second time photographing a boxing match and I learned a great deal, which I can share here, hopefully for others’ enlightenment. I borrowed my friend’s D600 body and brought my own, with one lens on each.  For up close and personal shots, I was primarily using my 50mm F/1.4 G lens, and for wide angle I had my 14-24mm F/2.8 lens.  Both work brilliantly as they can in these circumstances. 

The 50mm is almost perfect focal length for most close shots in the ring.  I debated dropping 3 grand on a 24-80 f/2.8 lens but decided better of it before and didn’t miss the zoom at all.  The F/1.4 is obviously to get as much light as possible, and even then it was still pushing it quite a bit.  I set my camera on AF-C continuous autofocus, shutter priority, not focus priority so the camera fires regardless of whether I had obtained autofocus or not when I pressed the shutter. I set the AF pattern to d9, nine point focus.  I also set it to shutter priority at 1/400 of a second to have crisp enough shots for the elusive glove-in-the-face shot, and also capped the ISO at 3200.  Even at 3200 I don’t like the low light noise on my D600, and find it unbearable above 3200.  But this combo worked well for all close shots.  Mind you I was ringside, standing up beside one of the corner posts for the most part.  I also set the drive to continuous high to capture bursts of action.

The 14-24 lens produced some surprisingly great photos of the action going on outside the ring, the judges, announcer, referee, and crowds.  I set this camera similar to the other one, except I set shutter priority at 1/125 to get a little more light with the F/2.8  instead of 1/400^th.  I set it at ISO 3200 and continuous low drive as well.

I was lucky to not have no one behind me.  I didn’t move around all that much, but it can be easy to get in spectators views while shooting.

I captured around 1200 photos from 9 matches.  Many photos were not in focus (or at least not focusing on what I wanted it to - between the low light, the super shallow F/1.4 aperture and the camera being set on shutter priority for the AF mode.  But I did capture some good ones.  You have to expect this, in these conditions.  The great photos are a lot of luck…  you just have to basically time when to hit the shutter as the opponents come together and hope for the best.

With these settings, the camera stayed at ISO3200 the majority of the time, sometimes dipping down to ISO2500.  Regardless, there is a considerable amount of noise in the photos, so I post-processed some of them in Topaz Denoise 3.0, which does help out quite a bit in reducing noise and tried to recover some detail.  The end photos are satisfactory, but I do wish the venue had much brighter lights to capture better photos.

Topaz Denoise

Blood Moon Lunar Eclipse Photography

D600 300mm F/5.6 ISO1250 0.8 sec

One thing I like about photography is it is a state of constant learning.  There’s always things to experiment and experiences to learn from, and it will always be like that.  Every photography experience I have, I learn from to improve my photos in the future.

D600 300mm F/5.6 ISO1250 1.3 sec

I got up nice and early at 5am today to photograph the lunar eclipse/blood moon.  Granted I don’t have a great lens for that – I was using my Nikon D600 body, with my 28-300 lens.  At 300mm zoom, this lens is a slow f/5.6 setting, but those are the tools I have to work with, as I tried to get a good photo of the eclipse.  A much better, and much more expensive setup would be to have my body mounted to a telescope, or have a $7000 300mm lens.

I set up my tripod in a park near my house where I had a view of the moon.  I live in a valley and the moon was beginning to set so it was low on the horizon.  I wanted to minimize the noise so I played with the ISO settings, and mostly left the camera on aperture priority, of course on the lowest f/5.6 setting at full 300mm zoom.   I had noticed in the past that the light metering tends to blow out some details on the moon from previous shooting even with center weighting on and focused on the moon, so I set the manual eV correction at -2.0 so it would underexpose the photo according to the processor to be able to capture the details better.

D600 300mm F/5.6 ISO200 3.0 sec
Note the lack of sharpness and the star trail under the moon

When I started looking through the photos in Lightroom for the best of the photos, I started to notice some things.  Most of the photos were 3 second exposures and longer, and most don’t have quite the details and sharpness that I would like. The best one at the top of this entry is the 0.8 second shot I got while bracketing.  The longer 10 second exposures are completely unuseable.   It became apparent that the moon it simply moves too fast and 3 seconds is too long of an exposure to be able to capture details on the moon clear enough.. Even stars have a trail at 3 seconds, and the moon moves quicker than stars. 

Next time I attempt to photograph the moon, I will set the camera to shutter priority, and play around in the ½ sec to 2 second exposure range and crank up the ISO to be able to get quicker shots.  It’s a balance between having a quick shutter speed to be able to capture details from movement and minimizing high ISO noise on the camera.

Paddling and Photography – how to make electronics and backcountry paddling trips mix

    I'm into landscape and nature photography and take many photos during my backcountry paddling trips, both for the beauty of the landscape or the moment itself, and also as sort of a photo journal for the trip and what the area looks like.    For the on the water shots, I use my trusty Panasonic TS2 waterproof tough camera.  Back about 5 years ago, I used to go through 2 or 3 of these ultracompact cameras a season as I kept getting them wet in one way or another, and waterproof cameras didn’t exist at the time.  I kept it in an otterbox strapped to my kayak deck.  Nowadays it’s all good with the ubiquitous waterproof tough camera.

      The photos that come out of the Panasonic camera are great for on the water, but I do prefer to have my SLR on land, for the depth of field, quality, resolution and low light performance it offers.  But, bringing something that costs that much with you where there’s water all about, and the possibility of getting all your gear soaked is very high can send shivers down some photographers spines.  I looked around at all of the options available for waterproof containers for my camera and I found a great solution with the Lowepro Dryzone 200.

     Firstly, I like to have my SLR accessible during shore stops, lunch, portages, etc.  when on paddling trips so burying it in a drybag in a dry pack doesn’t work for me, not to mention, there is not much protection against crushing, rubbing, etc.  I also wouldn’t want to just strap a typical drybag to the deck or put it in the bottom of a canoe, as I don’t trust 100% any dry bag to be sealed properly.  I could have also used an otterbox, but they are very bulky, square, and don’t have any proper straps for when I need to portage.

      I bought a LoweproDryzone 200 backpack about 5 years ago – it was the only type of purpose built water protection for cameras that is also carry friendly at the time, and still is, as far as I can tell.  It consists of an inner pod, what they call a drypod, which is essentially a PVC watertight casing with a drysuit zipper from a german company named tizip. The bag  comes with a variety of Velcro dividers you can configure any way you would like to, so you can separate lenses, filters, cameras and accessories.  It’s big enough to carry my D600 with 28-300 lens attached, and maybe one or even two more medium/large SLR lens would fit in it as well.  The drypod is attached to a nylon outer backpack shell with loops around the case and some wire.  But, I have since taken the drypod out of the backpack shell and just use the case itself.  The reason why I did that was the shell made it harder to access the contents as I would have to undo another nylon clip in addition to opening up the zipper, the shell is also heavy and soaks up water making it wet all the time and even heavier, and the shell does add some extra non-protected storage, but not all that much, for all the downsides it has.  The shell itself weighs 3 pounds, seriously.  And that is when it's dry.  There's no use for it for my needs.

  The full Dryzone 200.  I just ditched the outer nylon shell and use the inner drypod bag.

     When kayaking, I thread some bungees directly through the loops around the drypod base and attach it to my deck lines on the rear of my kayak.  It is easily attached this way, and is awesomely accessible when I get out of my kayak.  When canoeing, I just place the drypod on the bottom of the cane in front of me…  once in a while I will take it out of the case for some photos while on the water, but not very often.  I generally use it for all of my electronics while on a trip – batteries, phone, filters, etc, and sometimes even put my toiletries kit or a book in there for dryness and ease of access.

     The one downside of using just the drypod itself is the lack of straps for portaging.  I have used the bungies themselves many times to act as backpack straps, but it isn’t quite ideal, although it is manageable.  My last rip, I didn’t have the bungie configuration the best configuration, and I did pull one of the attachment loops off of the base.  Basically the glue gave way on the attachment loop itself, it didn’t tear a hole in the outside.  I am going to look into getting some aftermarket PVC attachment points and some glue to mount some attachments for just some simple backpack straps to make this this ideal for my needs as a paddling drypod for my SLR.

     As for keeping water out itself, it is rated for IPX7 which means it is submersible.  It comes with a small tube of silicone grease to keep the Tizipzipper lubricated and sealed properly, as is used with drysuit zippers.  I have done rolls in my kayak with it, and there is no issue.  There is one caveat though.  You must make sure you do the zipper all the way up.  One trip to the French River I was lining my kayak down some rapids and the kayak flipped over, putting the drypod in the water.  I wasn’t concerned at all about the water and took my time righting the kayak.  Then I realized I hadn’t done the zipper up all the way, it was about 2 inches open, and there was some water in my bag.  The water  did mess up the electronics inside the Nikon D300 that I had at the time.  Luckily I was able to recover $700 by selling it as a water damaged item on eBay at the time.  So now, I make sure double check the zipper before putting in with the bag.

     The Dryzone 200 inner drypod is very functional and I think it is the most useful product out there to take your SLR camera gear on backcountry paddling trips.  The outer backpack shell is somewhat useful, but I prefer to use the drypod without the outer shell.  My only complaint is it is very pricey for what it is.  I wish that Lowepro would make a different version to sell of this – just the inner drypod with just two shoulder straps attached directly to it, without the outer shell  to reduce the price.

LoweproDryzone 200

Tizip