Pro Wrestling Ulster Shoot

Sunday night meant the chance to shoot with the amazing local talent that is the Pro Wrestling Ulster Crew. As father Ted would have said, they're a great bunch of lads. This was the "Proving Grounds" even which was a chance for newcomers from the organisation's training academy to experience their first public bouts in front of a paying audience. It was great to see new characters, and there was obviously a lot of work had gone into the preparation.

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Apart from the action stuff, there is always plenty of scope for other type of shot, particularly when it comes to grappling and submission holds. Which does tend to lend itself to a spot of black and white.

 JDP (the one in the air) is a big guy but very athletic. As in, I couldnt-do-that-in-a-million-years athletic.

The belly slap and ripple effect - this was the second time I caught this in a bout and it doesn't half look really weird. 

 The last event was a royal rumble-style free-for-all with all the wrestlers getting into the ring and the last one standing being the winner. This was a nightmare to shoot and I have no idea how to approach this if it comes up again in the future.

Wrestling in Black and White

I got to shoot my second bout of pro wrestling last Sunday night. You can see the whole shooting match (so to speak) on my Flickr stream here:

Pro Wrestling Ulster on Flickr

While working through these I took a wee bit of a shine to the monochrome shots I'd processed. As always, it seemed to be the high contrast shots with a wee bit of drama that worked best in black and white. Here's the selection.

2013 365-7

Week 7 is upon us, or at least upon me. Another week sadly lacking in inspiration for photography, but I'm coming to realise that I go through peaks and troughs in terms of my own creativity and productiveness. It may be something to do with the three photoshoots I tried to cover on Sunday just past - three very different events, three very different sets of demands and problems, three very different atmospheres. Maybe I just got burned out?

11/02/13

One from last night's wrestling action, processed today. Like the way this turned out, and was one of the few times when my timing was actually right. Definitely great fun, and I'd definitely go back if I got the invite.

12/02/13

You have to admire Warhol, if not as an artist then as a shameless self-promoter. The MAC in Belfast has an exhibition on at the moment and it is, being quite honest, very good indeed. A couple of galleries of prints and some video stuff would let you put in a couple of hours. This is the wall of the main staircase, between the two main galleries.

13/02/13

My eldest daughter Siobhan, who was kind enough to come round and get her little sister started on some knitting this afternoon. Stitches were dropped on more than a couple of occasions but I did press Siobhan into posing in front of the speedlights. She hates it - I'm amazed that she still agrees to do it, although it does involve some complaining and then some post-shoot criticism of my photos and processing. I like this one and there was no complaints or criticism. Is that a good sign?

14/02/13

Pictures of my favourite skaters' butts is not something I'm going to take on as a full-time project, but they do wear pants that make me laugh. I was abut to say sometimes, but lately its been pretty much every week. This comes in the same week that a campaign by derby photographers in the USA led to the shutting down of a Tumblr site dedicated to just that topic, due to the amounts of photos posted on it that broke copyright laws. Whoever started the site must have been tired of reading takedown notices.

15/02/13

I have to take more landscapes! It annoys me that I just don't get landscape photography so I've decided to make more of an effort with it. I had read an article on panoramas, got my hands on some nice software and took a swing past Scrabo to test it out. I'm quite happy with how this turned out, although the more I look at it, the tower seems to be leaning ever-so-slightly to the right. Am I imagining this?

16/02/13

A while back, I started to get interested in roadside memorials. I'd recently started driving more in work, and visiting places I hadn't been before with the result that I was passing more of these memorials. I started carrying a spare camera in the car in case I saw one and started pulling over and taking a picture of each. This is the first of two "ghost bikes" in Belfast to commemorate the death of Michael Caulfield. Mr Caulfield was a 56 year-old cyclist and father of four killed after a collision with a lorry on Friday the 15^th April near this spot on the Ormeau Bridge. The bike was placed by an unknown woman. In June 2012, the original ghost bike was stolen but was replaced at the end of June. It has remained there since.

17/02/13

I'm not even going to start to explain why this shot is here. It just had to be here.

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.