John M. Setzler, Jr. Life in Black and White

Wrestling Season

Here we go again with another installment of the constant bichin' from me about having to photograph wrestling.   In my area, wrestling gets almost the same amount of coverage as basketball.  Or at least it has in past seasons, because I got stuck with shooting most of it.  Hopefully this year will see some balance in how much basketball vs wrestling I photograph each week since we have one new photo stringer and a second one on the way.  Since I'm not a fan of individual sports, I just have a hard time getting into wrestling personally.  You can call wrestling a team sport all you want, but until they put more than two kids on the mat at a time and let the last man standing get the win, its an individual sport. 

The above photo is a sample of what I can get at a couple of the schools around here.  The wrestling powers that be want to create 'mood' and 'atmosphere' for the fan base (parents and girlfriends) that attend these events.   That mood and atmosphere is created by turning off all the lights in the gym except for a single merc vapor directly above the center of the mat.  I can make some nice high contrast photos in that environment, but none that could possibly be used in the newspaper, so I have to pop my flash and flatten out any potentially interesting photographs and have no chance at excellence in natural lighting.