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Just to prove that I still occasionally shot a contest or two, shots from the 2019 Monsta Classic, held on August 10 in Lake City, are up on the site.

Between the change of venue of the Gainesville show out of the area and family schedule conflicts I’ve been unable to attend the shows I usually try to shoot, so it was nice to learn that I haven’t totally forgotten how to work the camera.

Gateway is still one of my favorite venues, largely because the steep tiers give me an unobstructed view of the stage, and whoever handled the lighting and stage banners for this show deserves a BIG thumbs-up. With all the vertical lines to align against, there was almost always some background object in the shot that helped distract from the parallax and give the shots a cleaner, more parallel appearance.

(I also proved to myself that my viewfinder is almost exactly one degree out of rotation from the sensor, as I took a number of carefully-aligned shots for that exact purpose– but that’s another story.)

I’ve started shooting tethered wirelessly to my laptop and when it works it’s wonderful; today I was running into some issues that I think had to do with the antivirus and the server software not playing nicely together. My connection crashed a couple of times and a few shots were missed for reboot while others were saved to the camera card out of numerical order.

I think I managed to get what I could salvage rearranged correctly. I’ve since changed antivirus and updated the server software, and it seems much more stable now, so next show I shoot should go much more smoothly. And when is that next show, you ask? As of now the plan is to shoot the Ultimate Muscle Classic in Lakeland in October, but I hope to be able to sneak in another show if the opportunity arises.

The official shots, as well as shots from the finals, can be purchased at monstaphoto.com, and I hope you enjoy these.

Shots from the 2018 Gainesville Classic are up on the site.

As always a fun and inspiring show, this year had some great quality competitors and resulted in a nice donation to cancer research.

The LED lighting was pretty blue; I was able to compensate by compressing the blue midrange a bit and adding a touch of red in the post-processing. However the trophy platform was way back in the shadows; I did what I could with those shots.

Enjoy!

Shots from the 2017 Gainesville finals are up on the site.

As usual promoter Tony Curtis put on a great show and the proceeds went to help cancer research.

As popular as LED lighting is becoming these days, I’m really surprised that the camera manufacturers haven’t included a generic (tunable?) white-balance preset for them.

I shot auto-white-balance for the prejudging, which I suspected was a mistake– sure enough, the balance changed depending on the athlete’s position on the stage. One day I may get around to rebalancing those, but it will be a chore. Might just convert all to B/W and load ’em up. :)

For the night show I managed to set a pretty good custom WB using the letters on one of the stage signs, so I’m pretty happy with both the color and consistency of these shots.

Enjoy the shots.

Shots from the 2016 Gainesville Classic, both prejudging and finals, are up on the LP site.

As usual Tony Curtis put on a wonderful show, and if you didn’t know the special thing about the Gainesville Classic, it’s that all the proceeds are donated to cancer research. Thanks to the extraordinary skill of the crew in the lighting booth (that’s tongue-in-cheek, it was me), I was able to get excellent shots of both events.

I saw some old friends, met a couple of nice people, and I think everyone had a wonderful time. Gainesville is kind of remote to the rest of the state, but if you get a chance to come out next year, you should do it.

Unless one of the three (!) shows on August 27 needs coverage, the next show I’m shooting is the Lakeland Classic on September 3. That’s moved to the Lakeland Center, incidentally, which is a really nice and well-lit venue, though I’ll miss the funky deco charm of the Lakeland Community Theater.

Long before that, though, I’ll have some new shots of Sherry Bubeck up. I think you’ll like.

Enjoy the shots!

Shots from the 2016 Monsta Classic, held waaaaay back on April 23, are finally up on the LP site.

I was coming down with some internal crud or other and the early shots reflect that; I apologize.

Moving slowly all morning, I got there far later than planned, and had little chance to pick a good spot or get everything set up before the show started.

Throw in the dark spot on the left side of the stage that required extra love and attention all morning, and I think I missed as many shots as I got in the first two classes.

(For what it’s worth, it was almost three weeks before I got over whatever that crud was.)

Arno was shooting the official shots, you can purchase them from his site.

I’ve been doing fewer shows each year; gas is still expensive, and the shows themselves are charging more.

Expenses aside, though, the main reason I’m shooting less is simply that I don’t have nearly the available time I used to have to dedicate to this.

That said, here’s the list of shows I’m planning to shoot the remainder this year:

• Central District, Lakeland, June 11 (Pre)
• Ancient City, St. Augustine, July 16 (Pre)
• Gainesville Classic, July 30 (Pre, finals if needed)
• There are three shows on August 27.   Though it’s a bit far, I can cover either Immokalee or Port St Lucie if needed.
• Lakeland, Sept 3 (Pre)
• Ocala Cup Classic, Oct 22 (Pre, finals if needed.  Hopefully we can avoid the pumpkin curtain this time.)
• All South, St Augustine, Nov 5 (Pre)

Shots from the 2015 Ocala Cup Classic are up on the site.

Ocala was the site of the last show I competed in, so I was very pleased that Sandy Rivera chose to bring bodybuilding back to this under-represented area of the state.

Despite being an inaugural show, things ran very smoothly, everyone seemed to enjoy the presentation, and as a bonus a nice gift was made to the Special Olympics.

The venue did present some challenges, however. When I first saw the backdrop I was intrigued to see how the background color would work (as a nice change from the customary neutron-star black).

By the end of the evening, though, I had sworn off all things orange, including cheddar cheese, pumpkin pie, sunsets, and Tang.

The venue lighting also needs some attention before next year. Lighting is probably the single most overlooked aspect of any show. For most dramatic productions, having bright oases on the stage is an acceptable, even desirable, condition; but for a competition prejudging it’s vital to have consistent, bright light across the width of the stage. You can see what I’m talking about in some of the prejudging shots.

I also had an issue with a slightly blurry portion of the visual field that I haven’t been able to track down yet. That area of Ocala is supposed to be haunted, so that’s one possibility, but it’s more likely that my UV filter had some fog on it, though I wasn’t able to locate it then and I can’t replicate it now. I’ve tossed that filter in any case, just to be sure.

Normally the shots don’t take nearly this long to bring up on the site, of course; the delay was partly due to not wanting to conflict with sales of the full-size shots (being handled by Sandy), partly because I normally only shoot the prejudging (between the morning and evening shows I took over 3,400 shots (!)), partly because the shots needed more post-processing than usual, and partly because it’s a very busy time right now– the new job’s a hassle and the kids have the flu, you get the idea.

After the morning show I also did a quick shoot with Jennifer Stilson. She was a real trooper despite being almost ready to pass out from the hunger and stress of competition (I wasn’t in much better shape by then, but that’s beside the point). Her husband was a godsend, handling the reflectors when the off-camera flash started going balky, she looked great, and the location is a hidden gem (Adrienne Smith showed it to me when we shot there), so we were able to turn out a nice batch of attractive and interesting photos.

All in all, Ocala was a lot of work, but it’s what I enjoy. I hope you do as well.

Shots from the 2015 Gainesville Classic show are up on the site.

This one took a while as I was very unhappy with my settings on the white balance. Usually I just set the warmth to “tungsten” and forget it, but I have a sneaking suspicion that there were a number of LED cans or spots added to the stage, and the white lettering on the logo behind all the competitors was just, well, purple. My fault for not looking for it in the preview shots, and for assuming nothing had changed since last year; I should have looked around up there to check it out. Anyway, I had to adjust the histogram on pretty much every shot, so that’s why they’re running a little late.

I shot tethered using Entangle on Linux again and it worked a treat; just need a better way to stand the laptop on its side since the shots are sideways. Since this show, I’ve also installed a lighter-weight distro and swapped the drive for an SSD, so the next shoot should absolutely fly– I can go from power-off to login screen in twelve seconds, and the proprietary video driver makes it even faster.

As usual Tony put on a wonderful show, and this one had the added bonus that the proceeds go to cancer research at the University of Florida, so I was happy to help out in a small way. There are still lots of other great shows this year; next up for me will be the Ocala Cup Classic on October 24.