[ultravista]

Photos from the IFL New Blood New Battles fight in Las Vegas on 02/29/08. I had ring-side access and an awesome time.

The gallery is broken down into Fights 1 through 8 and miscellaneous photos. The folders are further broken down into color and black and white directories. My favorites are the black and white images, they convey a much more emotional feel to the fighters and the struggle.

Looking forward to the comments.

Maintenance

[Angela]

Utravista, the link isn't currently working. Can you put a few shots up in your post to give us a taster?

[VikingPhotography]

Sam,

I've flicked through some of your shots in various fight galleries - on a few occasions you've managed to catch some good peak action; I do have some questions for you, though.

1. There are some select shots where the it looks like the action is just out-of-focus, spoiling otherwise usable shots. I can't tell with such low-res files but it appears that the ropes behind the fighters are more in-focus on such frames... were you using autofocus?

2. Another perplexing thing is that your camera settings (shutter speed, aperture and ISO) seem to vary quite a bit from set to set and, sometimes, even from frame to frame. The ringside lighting would have been constant during the fights so there should have been no need to juggle these settings - so what was going on?

3. Learn to cull your images effectively - wading through 600+ shots is not fun; you should post your best images that showcase peak action, along these lines

• A decisive moment i.e. a punch or kick connecting
• Frames that clearly have one or, ideally, both fighter's faces mostly visible
• No near-duplicate frames; post only the best from a burst
• If you're shooting ground fighting, there must be action in it to avoid being stale
• View your shots as a layperson would; if they couldn't tell what was going on in a shot at a glance, don't send/post it.

When I shot UFC 80, I took exatly 1186 frames of fight action. From these, I ended up whittling it down to 170 shots for transmission - or, in other terms, I sent just 15% of what I shot. That still left the editors over at ESPN with a boatload of images to sift through to accompany their coverage.

I know that you're relatively new to MMA photography and I hope the above serves as learning points to make you a more effective sports shooter - after all, if you want to progress to paying work, you'll need to adhere to the standards that all other pro shooters do