Santa Cruz Boardwalk Bombshells vs Rose City Rollers Heartless Heathers

Santa Cruz Boardwalk Bombshells host Rose City Heartless Heathers (plus some ringers, from Eugene and Seattle) at the Santa Cruz Derby Girl Stadium.





Okay, so it was a bit of a blow-out.  Apparently Megatron couldn't make it down for the bout and the Heartless Heathers went without a bench coach. 

I shot most of the bout with a digital rangefinder, but I also shot 3 rolls of Fuji Natura 1600 color film with my old Minolta XG-M with a ridiculous lens attached.  One of the fun things about shooting daylight film under a lot of tungsten lighting is how warm and yellow the photos look.  I even kinda like the oompa-loompa skin tones.





And as we saw last week, shooting at the Civic during the summer time gives all sorts of colors depending on the angle and proximity of the daylight streaming in from the side entrances.  Sometimes the digital camera will "see" tungsten (with using auto white balance), but the daylight will color parts of the photos in blue light... as we see here on the lettering of Maiden Hades' helmet.



Enough technical musings... here's some photo highlights

























 The full flickr set is here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nocklebeast/sets/72157627157725751/with/5976498202/

groms! SCDG Groms Jr Derby Double Header vs L.A. Junior Derby Dolls

 a few photos from the grom (jr derby) double header with LA.





















Kenny the Shark!

Bay Area 2011 League Championships: Richmond Wrecking Belles vs The Berkeley Resistance!

The Wrecking Belles went undefeated in league play up until the Championship bout.  My understanding is that the other three teams all had the same league records of 1-2... so I'm not sure what the tie-breaker that caused the newest league team, The Berkeley Resistance, to play the championship bout.... but they played it, which made for very colorful photographs. Fuchsia and Black vs Blue and Yellow!



If you go look at the full flickr set, you'll see I went a bit overboard with warm up shots.  The Craneway in the summertime offers lots and lots of light... not something I'm accustomed to shooting at  my home venue of the Santa Cruz Civic.





The Wrecking Belles seemed awfully confident going into this bout.



And they did end up winning it, 130-98.

For some reason, the west has the reputation for slow derby... but the BAD Girls still effing skate (not like Gotham and Philly).  At the BADG championships, the pack would often start slow.  So slow that, while I was camped out in turn one, I could move the manual focus ring of my lens to keep up with the pack.  But once the jammers were released,  I had quite a bit of fun to trying to anticipate when the jammers would suddenly come into view in the viewfinder, as they rushed into the slow moving pack.

Astronaughty seemed particularly good at sneaking around the outside of the pack.





Here's a few more photo highlights.... (the full flickr set is here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nocklebeast/sets/72157627042465101/ )










Didja know that sometimes Demanda Riot jams?  But PsychoSerapissed isn't scared.... she's smiling at the prospect of an epic showdown.