I went back to MBK yesterday for the Muay Thai fights trying to get some better photos. Usually they have one female bout and 5 male bouts, yesterday they had only 2 bouts for the guys and 4 for the women, 3 of which were championship fights. OK, so a women’s MBK belt is n’t that prestigious in the world of Muay Thai but that did n’t put the girls off. There was nothing girly about their fights, they really got stuck into each other. In fact their fights were better to watch than either of the two male bouts.

I know that I certainly would not want to pick a fight with any of those girls, not even the under 50kg class. They would kick my butt big time !
And then there was the “heavyweight” title between a Swedish girl and an Indian-Singaporean fighter who really had the crowd going wild … a fast athletic fighter up against a big strong brawler who ended up the winner and wearing the belt.
Last weeks fights all ended in KOs, all except one went the full distance this week. (one guy threw in the towel in round two, to the boos of the crowd)
I got there early this time, and got a ringside position from the start without having to work for it as I did last week.
I think I managed to get more decent photos this time, but I’ll probably go back next week, practice makes perfect !

The technical stuff for anybody who is interested : Nikon D800 with 50mm and 85mm f1.8 lens at f2.5, auto ISO 1000, aperture priority gave speeds of 1/160 to 1/320. I could have used slightly wider aperture and got faster shutter speeds but went for slightly wider depth of field. Imported into Lightroom using the “punch” preset (aptly named?), shadows and blacks slightly darkened to bring out the fighters more prominently.