Was laying in bed sick as a dog when my buddy Mike Isler sent me a link to a professional wakeboarding competition going on at Firebird Lake about 15 miles from my house. It had been a good 5 days since I had last shot so I was antsy to get back to work!
I sent an email about the shoot to my ESPN the Mag editor to pitch the idea to her. I was somewhat expecting her to decline the idea but I was delighted to get an email back a few hours later giving it the go ahead.
I’m not really much of a wrestling fan nor do I really know anything about the sport. But I do gotta admit you can pull some interesting pics from these type of events. Spent some time the first day shooting down low on the mat but the backgrounds were garbage so I decided to go up higher to clean up the shots. It definitely was a cleaner shot up high but you lost the perspective of how high the wrestlers were when they were being thrown through the air. The referees were a problem as they constantly were moving around and blocked several potential good shots. To combat that I put a remote camera up directly across from my shooting location to ensure I would have a clean shot of any big moments in the fight that may arise. In the final rounds the winners in each category would win a slot in the Beijing Olympics so the emotion displayed by a lot of the winners was fantastic. All in all it wasn’t too bad of a weekend.
