Category Archives: Martial Arts including Muay Thai

Extreme Muay Thai at Pattaya Max Stadium

Extreme Muay Thai hit the stratosphere when one contestant was carried out on a stretcher while another suffered a broken nose

Extreme Muay Thai
Although he throws in a few kicks Kriss Axelsson fights in a classic Western style. He narrowly wins his fight against a highly skilled Thai opponent who’s record last March stood at 88 wins out of 108 fights with only 15 losses and 5 draws. Kriss is a Swede who moved to Thailand to perfect his Muay Thai skills. He teaches Muay Thai in Koh Samui. From the little we saw of him, it would be difficult not to like this man. It is also hard to fault his boxing style.
Xtreme Muay Thai boxing,

So why am I calling this video Extreme Muay Thai when I’ve already done a Double Knockout video from all the first rate  action I’ve witnessed from my front row seat at Pattaya Max Stadium?  First off in all 7 fights the action was unrelentingly furious.  Secondly these 7 fights produced more than the usual amount of copious blood.   Third’s the music.  My pal, Big Daddy, called the whole scenario here as a disco with a lot of fighting thrown in.

For me  Extreme Muay Thai must have better music

With that in mind, I decided to break tradition by stripping all that wining, god awful Thai sound that seems to be de rigour for Muay Thai.  So I injected what I’m calling Jack’s special musical brew over the original sound tracks.

You might not like this video’s break from tradition.  But that’s just one more reason why I’m calling what you are about to experience  Extreme Muay Thai video.

Extreme Muay Thai video is for the high end viewer

I also took this video production to the limit by setting my Nikon at  60 frames a second.  And then I outputted the video at 30 frames a second to make it more appealing to audiences whose eyes are accustomed to watching video at 30 frames a second.

Nikon Glass makes all the difference

But that new Nikon 24 by 70 2.8 lens is sheer magic when it’s parred with my Nikon D750 SLR.  The new Panasonic LX10 with its 1.4 Leica lens is excellent.  But there’s nothing like shooting with very heavy, quite expensive Nikon gear.  But this Nikon Lens?  The colors that come from it produce an almost 3 D effect.  

The focusing of a professional Nikon DSLR camera is so fast that I can rapidly switch from the fight action in the ring to the spectators far away. Lesser cameras cannot do this.

It’s so good and so expensive that I recommend to those who take their photography seriously, to sell the family car, sell the kids and rent out your wife.

The last reason I’m calling this Extreme Muay Thai video, is that I am not keeping the typical internet smart phone user in mind at all.   All that resolution and excellent equipment is best experienced when viewed on a 55 inch television . And since sound is so important to me, I created it so that it could be best heard on a surround sound system with excellent speakers and a powerful amp.

Shooting fight video at Max Muaythai Pattaya Stadium

I’m shooting fight video while Big Daddy and I are sitting ringside at the Max Muaythai Pattaya Stadium watching 7 fights.

This Shooting fight video shows the fist is mightier than the leg
Maroan Hallal knocking out Mamai Por.Yuttapoom.  The video shows in this fight that the fist is more lethal than the kick

I’m concentrating on getting the video with my Nikon D750. Who’s winning? Where the prettiest girls are sitting? Which fighter is tiring the most? Big Daddy is fully aware of what’s going on. while I’m lost trying to get everything right with my camera.

The Nikon D750 is capable of shooting fight video of 4 k at 24 million pixels.

My lenses are the best that money can buy. But the camera is very complicated. There’s an entire 500 page book on how to focus the Nikon D750. I t’s that complex. Which is why I’ve been practicing shooting low light video for over two months now.  Usually in the confines of my condo with the lights turned off. So what’s going to give me the best results tonight?

Shooting fight video is easy for the professionals with the Fight Channel

Shooting fight video is a real challenge.  And there’s no way that I can compete against what’s already being done here at Max Muaythai Pattaya stadium.  There’s a robotic video camera circling over the ring that has a completely unobstructed view of the ring. It can zoom right over the heads of the fighters.   And it can veer far away for a perfect bird’s eye view.   There’s also two or three videographers who specialize in professional videography.   They use heavy specialized movie cameras that are built for one purpose only.   This being shooting movie quality video to be shown on international television.  The fights they are videoing tonight are being shown across the world on the Fight Channel.  There’s no way I can compete against those guys.  As for that terribly expensive overhead robotic camera.  There’s just no way.

But what I can do is, I can take you to the heart of the action the way the Fight Channel will never do. The sound is so loud here that the floors shake. The decibel level is so high that the distortion’s almost unbearable. To reproduce all that audible mayhem on the Fight Channel would be horrific bad taste. But try and tell that to the fans here. The speakers might be distorting as the stadium’s floor creates a mini earthquake. But it’s all pretty exciting.

There’s a huge movie screen way off to my left.  This screen reproduces whatever the production managers want to show their live audience.  The profiles of each fighter as he’s being introduced by the M.C. are displayed here.  These include the weight and height and record of each fighter.  As to be expected so is selected video footage of the actual fights.  Sometimes the footage is in slow motion whenever a knockdown occurs.  Then there’s all the pretty girls up in the stands.  Especially the Chinese and Thai women showing off for the video cameras as they dance to the music.

Most of the books on video technique will tell you that real videographers shoot in manual only. But if I try that, there’s no way that I can manually focus as fast as these fighters move. One moment the two fighters are just ten feet in front of me. Two seconds later they are thirty feet away. I cannot change the focus fast enough because my eyes are not up to this kind of challenge. Perhaps if I change my f-stop to f-10, I can get enough depth of field to keep the fighters in focus. But I know I’m too close to try that.

I cannot manually focus accurately and fast enough to change my target from the two fighters in the ring to a very sexy girl way up in the stands dancing for the Max Muaythai t.v. cameras.  So I must go with automatic focusing.  But which mode should I use? And at what speed or aperture setting?

Program mode is no good for shooting fight video.

And shooting with my Nikon 24-70 mm lens at 2.8 provides hardly any depth of field. I’m not doing very well at 2.8 which is what this lens excels at. But not when I’m shooting two fast moving fighters who are all over the ring.

Last week I set up my camera for continuous focusing for shooting fight video

instead of single server mode to that the Nikon could use all 51 focus points. But that didn’t work very well either. The problem was the camera would oftentimes focus in on the ropes instead of the fighters who oftentimes were twenty feet away from my focus point. The robotic camera circling overhead did not have this problem.

At first I set my focusing for a 4 point group focus mode. Theoretically this should work. I could set the little rectangle of 4 points between the ropes to zero in on the fighters instead of the English announcers sitting right in front of us. Would this work? I wouldn’t know until I processed my video the next day. So I shot a couple fights in group focus mode. Then I shot a couple more fights using automatic continuous focus mode using 24 focus points in a narrow horizontal pattern. Theoretically this might work just as well because I could zero the horizonal rectangle so that none of the 24 focus points rested on the ropes or the English ring announcers sitting in front of me.

What aperture should I be using for shooting fight video ?

I tried shooting at F-7, then F-10 aperture to get good depth of field in case the camera was not up to focusing fast enough to keep up with the two fighters. But it seemed to me that I might be getting my best overall results shooting at around an F5 aperture which should let in plenty of light while still giving me a reasonable dept of field in case my focusing was sightly off.

But I also wanted to get a lot of digital stills. This meant going from live view to viewfinder mode. Trouble was, and I found this out too late. Shooting in automatic 24 point mode I ended up focusing on nearby objects instead of the fighters. Not always but often enough. I was also shooting in aperture mode so my shutter speed was oftentimes not quite fast enough to stop the action. The obvious answer to this problem was to start shooting in speed mode at 1/500th or even 1/1000th of a second.

So here I was, going from live view aperture priority mode at f5 while doing video to shutter priority mode and also having the change my focus mode. That’s a lot of fast changing adjustments to be making for shooting fight video

Now if I was really serious about shooting fight video, I’d be buying myself another Nikon D750 body

which I could set up for video while I kept the other camera body adjusted for shooting digital stills at say 1/1000th of a second. But no one’s paying me to do this. And no matter what I do I will never be able to compete with that robotic overhead movie camera let alone two or three video guys all covering for each other. There’s just no way I can shoot video at the same time I’m shooting digital stills.

Shooting fight video of these seven fights ended up being a real mish mash of modes and techniques.  But I’m still nowhere close to where I want to end up doing. One of my best friends keeps telling me that I need to go mirror less which will have a lot fewer focusing issues. Shooting full auto with my Panasonic LX7 and its leica lens is like shooting fish in a barrel. But I have some terrific lenses for my Nikon D750.  There’s nothing like what I can get with these lenses if I have everything dialed in just right.

Muay Thai Stadium Tunisian whirlwind Fadi Khaled wallops Nueamek Sityaymeaw

We saw the Tunisian whirlwind  Fadi Khaled, put on one of the most exciting Muay Thai performances ever, from ringside, at Pattaya  Max Muay Thai Stadium.

Tunisian whirlwind Fadi Khaled
The Intensity of Tunisian whirlwind Fadi Khaled

An hour later, I would be videoing the unforgettable Jonathan Lecat Dorian Price double knockout, a fight that’s destined to become one of the most memorable classics of all time.

In this bout against Nueamek Sityaymeaw the Tunisian whirlwind Fadi Khaled demonstrates a full range of devastating martial arts weapons, including a full array of powerful kicks along with the punching power of a light heavy weight. Keep in mind that this little guy weighs just 140 pounds while light heavyweights are between 168 and 175 pounds. Notice too, how he flings his entire torso into the body of his opponent.

Harry Greb training.

Big Daddy sitting next to me, put it this way, “I really don’t like the looks of him, but you gotta give him credit. He’s a very good fighter.”

I’ll give him more than that. This Tunisian whirlwind Fadi Khaled represents what true fighting is all about. I’m sure Harry Greb would concur.

If you are interested in learning more about Harry Greb check this out.

You can get to watch a training video of Harry Greb on this facebook page.

You’d expect the preliminary bout between Fadi Khaled and Nueamek Sityaymeaw to fade away into the obscure dustbins of ring forgetathons.  How could I even think about putting the two videos up side by side on you tube? Am I out of my mind?

I’ve thought about that before.  Many times.   I am out of my mind.  No, I’m not.  Although both Khaled and Nueamek have far less than perfect records as Muay Thai boxers, this was in its own right a classic fight.

Tunisian whirlwind Fadi Khaled
The scorecards for both fighters show a mixed record.  Nevertheless, in this fight, the  Tunisian whirlwind Fadi Khaled proves that he’s a force to be reckoned with

I had never seen either boxer fight before.  But here I’m coining a new nickname, a moniker that should live on as the Tunisian whirlwind Fadi Khaled to extol the Tunisian whirlwind as a fighting man’s fighter.   And because I think Fadi  embodies even more than what Muay Thai boxing is all about.  For me Fadi represents the true spirit of mano a mano fighting the same way Harry Greb did nearly 100 years ago.

Harry Greb the Pittsburgh Whirlwind

Enshrined for nearly a century as the Pittsburgh whirlwind in boxing legend, Harry Greb was perhaps the greatest middleweight of all time.   This is saying a lot due to  so many outstanding Middleweights who one could easily call, the greatest Middleweight in the history of the ring.  Men like Sugar Ray Robinson, Sugar Ray Leonard, and the most devastating Middleweight puncher of all time,  Gennadi Golovkin. And yet there’s not a single film of Harry Greb’s epic fights. He once beat the unbeatable future Heavy weight champion, Gene Tunney in a historic bloodbath that began a series of epic encounters between the two finest boxing tacticians the ring had ever seen.

But Greb was a true Middleweight, whose normal weight stood at around 160 pounds. Whereas Tunney wound up as the undefeated heavyweight champion of the world at 190.  As for Jack Dempsey who was quite possibly the hardest puncher of all time, some have said that Tunney could never beat the Manassas Mauler in his prime. Others have claimed that Tunney was so good that Jack Dempsey could never have beat him.

We will never know the answer of whether a much younger Jack Dempsey could have defeated Tunney or not.

It is well known, however, that Greb totally dominated Dempsey as Dempsey’s sparring partner. Even though Dempsey outweighed the five foot eight Greb by 30 pounds, several times the pair almost met in the ring.

Jack Dempsey and Harry Greb
Jack Dempsey on the left with Harry Greb to his right. Greb defeating Dempsey, one of the most feriocious punchers of all time? You kidding? NOPE

Greb would wind up fighting 298 professional fights, yet not one of them survives today on video.

Gene Tunney fighting Harry Greb
Harry Greb won his first fight with Gene Tunney in a blood bath. Greb was about the only man to ever defeat Tunney who later beat Jack Dempsey for the world Heavyweight title and then defeated Dempsey in the rematch. Some say in his prime Dempsey would have won while others claim Dempsey could never have beat Tunney whose ring generalship was without parallel for his time. In many ways Tunney was like Andre Ward the current Light Heavyweight champion who hardly ever makes a mistake. But as the bloody matches with Harry Greb proved, Tunney could be a brawler when he wanted to be.

A Boxing Legend for all time

Greb remains today as one of boxing legend’s most unforgettable mystery men of all time. His untimely death at 32 on the operating table when he failed to wake up from the anesthetic hasn’t hurt his enigmatic image. But although the movie cameras never captured him in a real fight, there still exists at least one video of him training.Back to the Tunisian whirlwind Fadi Khaled