Black and White Scrimmage! hosted by Bay Area Derby Girls

Bay Area hosts a black and white scrimmage and they hold a little party afterward to draft some Rinky Dinks to league teams.

But first let it be documented that Bay Area is nice.  This photo is a document.



The advanced players line up before the scrimmage starts.  This portion of the warehouse is lit from daylight (cloudy) from the skylights and HID lights.  As the day goes on (with the daylight waning) the light  seems to get greener and greener (even without using flash... which perplexes me).



Would you believe there was an official time out so Lunchmeat could tell a fish story to the rest of the referees?



No?  Actually, there was some sort of biohazard that happened on the track.



I wonder if WFTDA could adopt a "best practice" requiring outside pack refs to always skate this low, so as to be less of an obstactle to photographers on the outside of the track.



 An example of some green light in the background (It's really green, but perhaps not in a bad way).




















A little pony.



Trixie Pixie makes a big announcement


Each of Bay Area's league teams announces new draftees from the Rinky Dinks

ShEvil Dead


Berkeley Resistance


Oakland Outlaws


Richmond Wrecking Belles


A little smack talking from the 2011 league champions

MBDD: Cannery Rollers vs Babes of Wrath (October 2011)

Some photo highlights of Monterey Bay Derby Dames' last bout of the season.  (The full flickr set is here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nocklebeast/sets/72157627893162253/).

Santa Cruz Harbor Hellcats vs Lake Tahoe Derby Dames

Some photos highlights (the full flickr set is here: www..flickr.com/photos/nocklebeast/sets/72157627987151154/)

A double header at San Jose Skate

Silicon Valley KillaBytes vs Central California Area Derby 

and

Silicon Valley Dot.Kamikazes vs Orange County Roller Girls Blockwork Orange.

First, before the photo highlights... a little preamble:

I shoot with a digital rangefinder.  Unlike a digital SLR, a rangefinder doesn't have a mirror box between the lens and the sensor.  The lens on a rangefinder sits closer to the sensor than the lens of an SLR. Which means the light focused onto the rangefinder's sensor strikes the sensor at more of an oblique angle than with an SLR.  Apparently, digital sensors are more sensitive to light striking them at a perpendicular angles and so with a rangefinder, the sensor's designers (Kodak in this case) have to coat the sensor with little microlenses to focus the light back to perpendicular to the sensor.  I believe this means that the high-ISO performance of a rangefinder... just won't be quite as good as the high-ISO performance of an SLR.

So what does that mumbo-jumbo really mean?  

My highest ISO my camera goes to is 2500. Not 3200, not 6400... 2500 (and it's a bit noisy at 2500 too).

San Jose Skate is a dimly lit skating rink a little south of San Jose off highway 85.  How dim is dim?  Without using a flash, and setting the shutter speed to 1/125th of a second (perhaps the slowest shutter speed that will freeze derby action... most of the time), and maxing out the ISO at 2500, you need to set the aperture to f1.2 or maybe f1.4 to get a nice bright properly exposed photograph.



Shooting without flash at f1.2 or f1.4 (with a manual focus lens) means the depth of field is very shallow, and the focus is a little soft too.







It's been a little over a year since the last time I shot at San Jose Skate. Last February, another photographer asked me about the light at San Jose Skate... I got so depressed thinking about the dim fluorescent lighting that I didn't go to the bout.  But I managed to make it to last Saturday's double header.

Now the ceiling is a neutral color and is quite low, so using on-camera flash and bouncing it off the ceiling works pretty well... next time I got to dial down the flash just a little bit (about 1/2 stop) to prevent losing detail in the blown highlights.

The full flickr sets are here (Silicon Valley KillaBytes vs Central California Area Derby and Silicon Valley Dot.Kamikazes vs Orange County Roller Girls ), and here are some highlights.