Not quite spotlit

"Uintah's Damon Mele ties up with Millard's Dakoa Payne during the 140-weight bout at the All-Star Wrestling Dual at the McKay Center on the campus of UVU, Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2010."

Last year I shot spotlit wrestling once. I fell in love instantly.

Since then I've been dying to shoot another match where the only thing illuminating the wrestlers is a huge, direct overhead spotlight.

Last week, I got done working on my multimedia, so I went to shoot spotlit wrestling with our intern. However, when we got there it was at a different venue, which wasn't close, nor spotlit.

Fast forward to earlier this week. I was given a wrestling tournament, all-star event. I was excited because I was told during the state tournament this arena spotlights the matches.

During the warm up all the lights were on. I was sad. But then the music started pumping and the lights went down. It was spotlit despite there being three rings side-by-side.

But that didn't last long. The direct light overhead (as seen in one picture above) was then changed to lights on each side of the mat. Not quite spotlit, but helped eliminate cluttered the background.

I didn't have my best time shooting either. I was shooting for our paper and our sister paper and wrestling is already tough to begin with when it comes to tracking names. But I felt as if all the action went away from me and the matches I shot the wrestlers didn't exert a lot of pain.

Oh, well. Until the next event, here is what I came up with. Most of these didn't even get moved because they featured no one I needed either.