30 minutes with Paul Daley — an editorial photo shoot with a top MMA fighter

Editorial photo shoot with Paul Daley, a top "Mixed Martial Arts" fighter.

Quite what a "MMA fighter" is was a mystery to me, when I rolled up to Liberty's Gym in Nottingham to photograph him for a certain national newspaper.

What it means, after watching him spar, is he is one tough guy!

With 30 minutes to do a set of portraits, and training pictures… here are the results…

Portraits first.. 2 lights with radio slaves, shot on the 5d mk2.

But before I did those, I had a rare opportunity to do some traditional photojournalism styley piccies. (Actually this was desperation after it became clear that setups might be out of the question time wise!)

The originals were delivered to the client in both colour and black and white.

Here I present the black and white versions…. which I think are nicely evocative.

So, what had started as a bit of a cluster, turned out pretty well.

For the techies out there, lighting in the first set is Canon 580, 2 heads, one bare, one on a softbox. Camera is 5dmk2, lenses are 70-200 f2.8 canon and 17-40 canon. The black and white piccies are all at 1600 ISO and on the same lenses.

Gobsmaking to me was the fact that my red top client ran 2 of the PJ styley pics and a portrait! (Though not one of the above, again they didn't pick my favourite!)

And Paul won his fight, something called "BAMMA 5"!

This blog was first published over a decade ago! Check out the current corporate and commercial photography. To see some more cool black and white athletes photography, check out the one about Italy's Olympic swimmers.

Get in touch to see how I could help you with some new photography!