Pro Wrestling Ulster

I had my first chance to shoot some local wrestling bouts on Sunday night, courtesy of Pro Wrestling Ulster. The event was in the ballroom of the Balmoral Hotel, Belfast and there was reasonable crowd turned up. The crew at the event were really helpful, with lots of tips and suggestions for what/where to shoot. Technically, this was a difficult one due to the poor lighting in the venue, and my original idea of shooting using only ambient light went out the window very quickly. Using on-camera flash was also awkward, since I didn't want to blind someone while they were leaping off the top rope. The solution seemed to be to use bounce flash with the very low and white ceiling as the target. I ended up shooting at 1/500sec, somewhere between f3.5 and f5 and with the ISO set to auto (it seemed to range between 4000 and 6400.

As always with wrestling (or at least what I've seen on TV) there's a lot of theatricality and that definitely makes for good shots.

Catching the various wrestlers when they're not actually throwing each other around the ring was also pretty easy and yielded some nice shots.

But, of course, it all comes down to the action. Guys in mid-air, guys hitting each other, guys hitting the floor of the ring hard. As with any new sport, I had issues with my timing and angles. This meant I was spending a lot of time on the move trying to figure where and what to shoot. I ended up with a reasonable collection of shots by the end of the night, but also a fair number of "duds" for the trash basket. Some more experience might make this a bit less "hit and miss" if I get asked back.