By I’ve never photographed a mixed martial arts fight before, though I’ve casually been fascinated by the sport. I’ve been distracted from many conversations as my eyes drift toward a television screen showing a UFC fight. So it was fairly exciting to receive the assignment to photograph the UFC fight night at Consol Energy on Saturday, February 20.
My main interest in photography is to experience something new that I’ve never seen before, and this certainly fit the bill. When I mentioned the assignment to my father, he pointed out that shooting ringside, I would be well within range of the blood spatter from the fighters.
Great.
I was early arriving to the arena, one of the first photographers in the door for credentials. I knew I would be filing against a tight deadline that night so I acclimated to the scene, found my shooting location and table space for my laptop.
Once the fighting began, I became a machine. There were 13 fights scheduled. The first fight started at 5:30 ending with the last battle at midnight. While I could have skipped some fights that were less important, I decided that this was a once in a lifetime assignment, and I would photograph them all.
The first fight was slow, as two heavyweights lumbered around the ring. The second was a bloodbath, as one of the female fighters gushed blood from her nose, covering both herself and her opponent, the victor, in red.
There wasn’t much time between fights, perhaps five minutes unless the previous fight had ended quickly in a knockout. I photographed furiously, knowing that any punch or move could be the abrupt end to a fight.
In the five minutes between bouts, I would run back to my laptop, download the images and edit the ones from the previous fights, caption them and send them back to an editor at the Post-Gazette. There wasn’t time to be nuanced or thoughtful in the edit. Just play it safe, get the most obvious pictures back, and move on to the next fight.
The evening’s most dramatic moment came after Ohio native Cody Garbrandt won his match in front of a home crowd by knockout. He howled at the crowd and jumped up on top of the cage, with his back to us photographers, and egged on the crowd. Sometimes, you can’t help missing a shot.
At the end of the night, I was filing pictures far past deadline, with no photo editor at the paper to receive them. It was late, and time to go home. And without a drop of blood on me.