Last weekend I was assigned to cover a boxing tournament. I was excited! My first time shooting boxing. I didn’t care at all that it was amateurs battling it out in the ring. I was just looking for blood spatter and knockouts!

Yeah I know … It was amateurs in the ring, soft gloves and helmets and crap like that and only 3 or 4 round bouts, so the odds were completely against me. A couple of boxers did get a bloody nose but no beat up faces or boxers going down. Og well … I had good fun anyway.

Canon EOS-1D Mark II n, EF 70-200mm f/2.8L USM @ 175mm, f/2.8 1/320sec, ISO1250. (Photo: Brian Poulsen)

I local boxer won the regional championship today. I was assigned to shoot a photo of him. I wasn’t quite sure where I would meet him.It turned out to be at the gym so I was thinking maybe one of those sandbags would do. When I walked in I saw the end wall was mirrors from floor to ceiling and thought that maybe bouncing the flash into the mirror would give me some better and more dramatic lighting.Once I had dialed in the flash and camera settings for the correct exposure, I would still see the ceiling lights and the wall behind him was still visible. So I walked backwards having the mirrors to the left of me, creating distance to the wall behind the boxer.The ceiling lighting was killed and the aperture dialed up a bit and iso down along with a faster shutter speed. That would make the background go away.For the first couple of shots, the boxer had his gold medal around his neck. His right glove and arm (left from my view) was blocking the medal leaving the area it was in pitch black. That’s a no go. So I thought, “Hey, why not let it hang over his glove”?A little adjusting and it was right on.Mevaip Sabani won the regional Amateur Boxing Championships Sunday. He had only boxed 10 matches prior to entering the tournament. (Photo: Brian Poulsen)(Canon EOS-1D Mark II n, 17-40mm @ 17mm, 1/250sec, f/6.3, ISO100, Speedlite 580ex bounced into a mirror to the left)

Assignment: Shoot pictures from a local boxing clubI was assigned to shoot some photos from a local boxing club. There are some obvious shots that you would most likely expect to see. Such as this one:To me that’s a pretty standard boxing gym photo. Somebody putting handwraps on.The lighting in the gym was straight out horrible. I had to shoot a picture of one of the boxers as well for a side article. There were some huge mirrors in the gym and decided I would try to use the mirrors by bouncing the flash into them and that way get a different look or feel to the image.Before shooting that picture some girl was pounding on a bag and I used her to test it out before going over to the guy I had to shoot.Anyway one of the aspects of the story was that there is up to 40 boxers in pretty small gym that only has one boxing ring in it. That’s basically what I wanted to do something with. The standard picture showing as many people as possible shot a bit from above was my first approach.That photo was just too straight forward for me and I wanted to do something different. I went closer to the ring at ground level and explored my options.I came up with this:I really like the how that came out and I’m more excited about the paper actually bringing this photo. I like the different stuff and I like the fact that the paper would bring this.Anyway they are doing neck strengthening drills where the people laying on the ground would push their head back against the people standing in front of them, placing their hands on the back of their heads as resistance.