One Game at a Time

On Friday I got together with a Nikon Professional Services representative and he offered me a D3 to demo this weekend and for a little bit this upcoming week. I was very excited to take advantage of the offer especially given the subject matter I planned to photograph this weekend: wrestling.

The 2008 ACC Tournament for wrestling was held in College Park and I was looking forward to being a part of it. I've gone to a few duals at Maryland this winter and have had trouble working with the light. Greg shoots a D3 and he reports you can get very good performance at high ISOs.

I was very impressed with the D3. I was able to shoot 1/500th of a second at ISO 4000 and not have to do any lightening in my post processing. I used auto white balance and the shots came out a little weird. I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it's saturation though...

I had a great time shooting the D3 on my 70-200mm lens. It was sharp as a tack at 200mm and I was very happy with it. During the consolation games I snuck out and did a softball game. The 400mm performance on the D3 was incredible.

Please go read my article that reports on the 2008 ACC tournament results and includes photos of all the matches.

Heading into this weekend I knew I was going to be busy. I shot the Maryland Women's Basketball game on Friday night, then 2 wrestling matches on Saturday, my company holiday party Saturday night, a Maryland Women's basketball game on Sunday, and lastly the Maryland Men's basketball game on Sunday night. Heading into a 2 day 6 event schedule is pretty challenging - you must have all your batteries charged and all your equipment packed and ready to go. While you're at the events you have to stay on top of your game and work through your photos as efficiently as possible.

While I shot the women's game on Friday night I went back through and deleted bad photos during media timeouts. I wrote my article and posted all my photos to my personal archive and to the DC Sports Box before I went to bed on Friday evening. My batteries were on the quickcharger so that they would be ready for wrestling tomorrow.

I did the same thing while shooting wrestling. I went through my photos during the match to reduce my post-processing workload. I managed to get through almost all of them by the time I had to leave to go shoot my company's holiday party.

I finally got around to posting my writeup of the Rutgers wrestling match. Please have a look over at the DC Sports Box.

The Terps dualed with Rider this afternoon in the Comcast Pavilion. Maryland performed solidly and scored 2 out and out pins, and 1 technical fall. The lighting was difficult to work with as usual. I had a good time shooting the match because I listened to my iPod. Yay.

I snapped about 300 or so photos during the match and reviewed them in the 45 minutes between the Rider and Rutgers dual. Greg was there with his shiny D3. I'm so envious of him. He shoots at 6400 and 1/500th and his shots are brighter, sharper, and less noisy than my 1600 D200 at 1/250th. But his camera costs about $5K and mine ran me around $1500. I'm happy that for 1/3 of the price I'm able to get some usable shots.

Please go take a look at my article and photos on the DC Sports Box.

The Terps are playing the BB&T Classic and fortunately we have a credentialed reporter and photographer present at Verizon Center. Since I'm trying to spread the wealth around with my fellow reporters I decided to cover the Wrestling dual this afternoon. This was a first for me: I've never shot or written about wrestling before. It was in Comcast Pavilion so I was familiar with the venue, but I was unfamiliar with the players or how the game is tallied.

My photos came out so-so. Wrestling is a lot slower than volleyball so I was able to slow down my shutter to 1/120 - 1/200th. Down around 1/120th I got some motion blur. Up at 1/200th it was dark at times (at 1600 ISO). It was difficult to work with a black mat. The players faces look down for the most part and the black light doesn't reflect very well.

Please go over to the DC Sports Box and read my article!