Day 17 – Grunt
The owner/instructor at the big Taekwondo dojo on Main Street wasn’t really making it easy for me to photograph a class for my daily assignment, so I went to Merced MMA, a mixed martial arts studio also on Main Street. After going one day and introducing myself, they told me to come back the next day so they would had a chance to talk with the management. In the end, they were much more cooperative!
I’ve always enjoyed making sports pictures, though mine are of the more standard action variety than anything truly unique or interestingly different. Getting the lacrosse picture was relatively easy, mostly because the player was running drills and not zooming all over the field, and it was outside, so I had plenty of light so I could both stop down and speed up. Merced MMA is in a former car dealership, so it’s all windows, but the class I wanted to photograph was at night, so natural light wasn’t a consideration, so I’m all the way open and relatively slow for action.
I’m also trying to use the 85mm (127.5mm) more, but long, clean lines of sight were hard to come by, and trying to shoot really tightly on sports action requires more skill than I currently have. So I used both lenses, which includes the 25.5-75mm zoom.
