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In this case, well-controlled biffo - on a very colourful stage, with pretty professional-looking boxers, and wonderful ring girls. They were never a feature of the old fights on television in the 50's but I'm firmly in favour of them now! And my complements to them - everyone else in the place was rugged up against the cold and either dodging punches or drinking hard - and the two ladies carried on wearing bikinis without flinching. That's spirit.
The unique feature of this evening was the large supply of cameras, lenses, and general gear intended for the fans - they got to play with the gear and then use it ringside to see what it did in the mixed lighting. The trade firms that laid it all out are to be congratulated - Of course they went at it hard at the Photo Live 2018 day as well, but that is tomorrow's report.
Some observations from the night:
You can certainly encounter some mixed lighting in these situations. My RAW files have a yellow/blue pattern that is actually a difficult balancing act - made worse by the fact that I shot fill-flash from the little pop-up in my Fujifilm X-E2. It is wonderfully compact, but one temperature...and that may not be what everything else is. The real answer is to gel off a larger flash to about what he room lights are ( And there you've got to be a good guesser because there can be a large variation in the colour temperature. But I did not have a larger flash....and that will be the subject of a report sometime further down the track...
Colour is wonderful in most pictures. All the originals are quite spectacular. But I remember the old Hollywood fight movies and the television bouts before colour. So I tried a Woodburytone for some of the best ones. I think it gives a grittiness to it. Maybe that's not the right thing for the ring girl...
You can't shoot a boxing match through an EVF any more than you can a belly dance show. Too much happens in the miniscule interval between your eye seeing a good thing, you finger hitting the trigger, and the camera capturing it. You can't even depend on the AF mechanism to hurry you into focus in time. All the camera salesmen will tell you that their camera can do it but the speed of the boxers and dancers proves them wrong.
What to do? Manual focus on a zone and set a small enough aperture to be in reasonable focus in that zone. Pipe the action through to the LCD screen at the back of your camera. Keep the players, fighters, or dancers mostly centred and watch them over the top or side of the camera. If you can get into the rhythm of the action and start to anticipate what the next move is going to be, you can fire the shutter at the right time. Most of the time...well, some of the time.
Or get a Leica or a Fujifilm X-Pro1 or 2 and use their optical finder. Or a DSLR. Or a Speed Graphic with a wire finder.
Lighting is paramount to success, and you need less of it these days than before. I'm a throwback to the flash era and I want the unnatural look of it. Boost things up to 6400 ISO and fear nought. That Fujifilm X-Pro2 with an f:2 lens looks good right now - and rumour has it that a 33mm f:1 Fujinon will eventually be made.
Question...what other indoor oddities happen at night in Perth that would make good photo expeditions? Dance shows all over the place in the season. Indoor sports events. Indoor radio-controlled model airplane flying - I've seen that at the Midland Velodrome. Write in and tell us the things you've found.
Okay...this was pretty spectacular. What are Saul and Howard going to do to top this one next year? Whatever it is, I hope it has ring girls.
* It was not safe to sit on the couch next to Louie in the heat of the sport. He would sock left and right along with the TV screen...
