Shots from the 2010 Jacksonville Physique are up on the site.
I decided to go to “The Pit” (aka the Lazarra Theater at UNF) mostly as an experiment– there are many good shows being held there and I needed to find *some* way to get some decent shots.
The first few shots should give you an idea of the typical “audience experience” at Lazarra— I had one of the best seats in the house, fourth row center, where the slope of the auditorium floor has begun to rise but not so far away as to _guarantee_ lens jiggle in every frame. And my view was terrible.
“Keyhole surgery”– in this case trying to find a decent shot on multiple moving targets while threading between judge’s heads, Ian’s arm, meandering gofers, and the UNF Marching Ospreys– is an experience I strongly recommend if your blood pressure is boringly normal and needs a good spiking. I’m sure my ocean-like swaying to find a line on the shots did not endear me to the people sitting behind me, either, as their view was equal to mine plus one row worse.
None of this, it should be mentioned, was the promoter’s fault– he had offered me a seat behind the judges, next to Ian. I declined simply because my last attempt from that location was, well, bad and humiliating; moreover, there was little point in essentially duplicating Ian’s shots. I was still looking for something I’d not noticed before– something out of the ordinary. Lazarra *does* have an upper tier, and if I had one of those high-powered, $2500 sports lenses, I’d crawl against the rail with a tripod and shoot the show with a smile. Alas, with what I had, I had to keep looking.
For Lazarra to _really_ be workable for bodybuilding competitions, the stage needs a riser of at *least* eight inches (and a foot would be better), some enhanced lighting, and either some decorative statuary to offset the backdrop (something like the St Augustine shows often had) or else a backdrop in some other color than “Neutron Star Black”.
But I’d just called the service, and they confirmed that (yet again) no one has died and left me Grand Exalted Poo-bah King of Stuff, so my mission remained the same– think outside the box and find *some* way to get some shots.
Then I noticed the box wings– a tier of seats to the far left and right of the auditorium, running up past the first row, elevated about two feet above stage level, at a somewhat sharp angle to the competitors but with an unobstructed field of view to the stage itself. And the entire block of seats was currently unoccupied. Maybe, I mused… just maybe… if I could find a short break in the competitor lineup (and Deke was wasting no time this morning!) I could, you know, check them out…
Feh! The seat I *had* wasn’t going to get any better, so I grabbed the long lens and hustled up the aisles and over to the seats. Jackpot!
You can see on the show collection exactly where the shots changed angles, and that meant I once again had static white balance, just enough light bounced from the floor to give me some nicely accurate skin tones, and the view was open enough that the auto-focus wasn’t doing St. Vitus’ dance like before. The one trade-off was that the sharp angle to the competitors was, well, fairly useless when they were posing to the front of the stage. I got around that by shooting mostly the groups– which meant less post-processing work for me on Easter, so one-and-a-bonus there.
Speaking of Easter, there was some pretty foul language coming out of the speakers during the prejudging– easily bad enough that Pete would have disqualified any competitor on the spot for using it. I don’t think anyone officially _sanctioned_ that particular slice of what I will for lack of a better word call “music”, but why have music during the prejudging anyway? Save the glitz for the night show, says I, and furthermore–
Whups, the service just called, and I am still not Grand Exalted Poo-bah King of Stuff. Disregard. Enjoy the shots, and ignore the rambling.