carlo obillos photography

The dojo where I train holds fight nights every so often, and when I happen to bring a camera, I get a great seat pressed right up against the cage.

I've shot a few of these now, and one thing I've learned is to pick a good spot and stay put. The action in the cage moves around a lot, and no matter where you stand, you might have something or you might not. But every time you move, you're missing everything, so by staying in one place, you can eliminate dead time and increase your chances of getting a reasonable shot. Or hundreds.

This cage is smaller than UFC standard, and my 28-70 f2.8 was all I needed for the night. I've shot other fights with two lenses (the second was either a 17-35 or 70-200) but I'm all about simplifying lately. 28 is wide enough to get 2 people full length (if they are in the middle of the cage) and 70 is tight enough to get a decent grimace-in-response-to-a-front-kick-to-the-gut.

Lighting? The flash/camera-to-subject distance was constantly changing, so E-TTL was the only way to fly. The ceiling is low and white, and I had a white wall behind me, so bouncing was the obvious choice. In fact, I never use direct, on-camera flash when there is a surface to bounce flash from. Like never. You shouldn't either. Its just poor form.

click on the image above or here for the full set on flikr.

Mixed Martial Arts in Owen Sound

Click the image to see the review.

This lens is taller than a toddler and heavier too. The image doesn't even fit on the page! I actually have little interest in this lens other than a freak-show like curiosity, but a freak show it is. The image and review are from the digital picture, a very thorough and excellent resource for Canon lens and gear reviews.

Canon 1200mm f5.6

Morgan, Isaiah, and I went for a bit of a climb on a sunny Wednesday afternoon. I was a bit rusty, not having been on real rock for several years, but I was still good for four solid climbs. Isaiah cleared Happyface (5.8) twice, and Morgan free soloed a 5.10b, which I bailed on.

I brought 2 lenses with me, my 17-35 f2.8, and my 70-200 f2.8is. I ended up using more shots from the long lens-17mm on a cropped sensor body is not quite wide enough for the shots I wanted to take that day.

Click here to see the whole set on flikr.

Rock Climbing in Grey County

As my kids moved through nursery school, I always felt like I was missing out on something. We had received photo albums for school portraits when each of our sons was born, but it seemed like forever until we would get to start filling them up. I take lots of shots of the kids, but its a rare occasion when I make them sit still for anything so formal as a school photo. And putting t-ball shots in the school album just seemed like a non-sequitur.

Something needed to be done. I approached the director of my sons' nursery school and offerred to shoot some portraits of the kids- we scheduled some visits, wrote a letter home to parents, and started shooting.

My original plan was to put the kids outside, use a long pc cord, long lens, and large aperture to turn the background into mush. It was a good plan, given that Winter had given up more than a month before. But then Winter came back. It came back with 15 cm of snow and harsh, blistering winds two days before I was to start shooting. Outside=no. Go to Plan B.

This particular nursery school resides in a former residence, full of the original woodwork and loads of character. I ended up choosing the wooden front door as a backdrop for a couple of reasons: First, the warm tone of the door was too good to pass up, and second, the white wall just to the right of the door provided perfect fill light, which simplified my lighting setup immensely.

Exposure was set at iso100, f3.2, 1/160. At this exposure, the room lights were doing nothing, but the window light was giving me a bit of glow on the kids' hair. A canon 580EXII flash in an umbrella was the main light (to the left of the camera) and the aforementioned white wall bounced the flash back to the other side of the face, providing fill light. Post-processing on shots like this is almost non-existant, since the lighting and exposure are tightly controlled, and there is no variation from shot to shot.

School photos

Mal and Steve were in Owen Sound last weekend to finalize a bunch of details for their June wedding at Cobble Beach, and while they were here, we spent a morning visiting some great historic buildings and taking lots of engagement shots. They asked me to shoot some polaroid at their wedding (for the guestbook, and maybe for some other shots too), so I broke out a fresh pack and shot some of that as well.

On the technical side, I have been using pc cords (DIY-instructions here) for off-camera lighting for quite a while now, but this day, I was using some borrowed Pocket Wizard radio triggers. On an outdoor shoot with remote flash, I would usually use a long (20 ft)pc cord, but this day I had a couple of cameras, and a shoulder bag containing the polaroid, so it was nice not to have to. Radio triggers are definitely in my near future.

Mal and Steve's Engagement Shoot

The Dragon's Den in Owen Sound is where you go to get scary. It is. When I started hanging around there four years ago, I was a skinny pacifist. Now I'm a skinny, pacifist killing machine, but I digress.

Almost as long as I've been training at the Den, I've been shooting the fighters. I've shot through the chainlink and ropes at fight nights, and every now and then, I shoot portraits.

I've been looking for things to shoot for stock, and with the UFC expoding like it has, I decided to shoot another series of fighter portraits, but this time, I was going dark-I wanted these guys to look every bit as scary as they are when you're facing them in the cage (actually, they are all really nice guys).

This time, I used hard light all around, to maximise the shadows and muscle definition. I used a boom to hold a flash straight overhead, While two additional flashes lit from the sides. The overhead flash was just a bit in front of the subject, and the idea was to get it to only light the upper surface of a muscle group, and leave harsh shadows for better definition. To make sure I still had some detail in the shadows, I had a white reflector on the floor, just in front of, and angled into the subject.

You can see the whole set by clicking here, or by clicking the image at the top. In the meantime, here are a few more.

Fighters and harsh lighting