Dream 8 Weigh-ins

Catching up on a couple weeks, had a lot of shows on recently and a corrupt BIOS and broken AC adapter has kept me from keeping things up to date. Until I get these problems fully sorted out, I’m going to be pretty slow getting stuff up to Flickr and SmugMug as all the batch processes were on my other computer.

FEG’s Dream 8 was held down in my Japanese hometown of Nagoya and for the first time in ages (maybe ever? I can’t remember) Dream held public “weigh-ins” .

I use the term weigh-ins loosely as the fighters actually weighed in at the hotel an hour before and they weren’t actually using the scales at all. If you look carefully you can see the official holding the scales with his finger.

Public weigh-ins are always fun and I wish they would hold them more often. From the perspective of a journalist and a photographer they are a lot more challenging but the mood is much better. Highlights for me included Shinya Aoki and Hayato “Mach” Sakurai’s face off where they did their best faux badass rapper impersonations (which didn’t make the cut on Sherdog for some reason) and of course Minowa and Shibata. Lowlight was definitely the weather.

DJ Taiki had a really hard cut and was clearly sick as a result. I had heard he was about 3kg over initially and had a difficult time cutting the rest. Hard to blame him though when he was giving so little time to recoverer after his brutal match with Shoji. Sherdog didn’t run any photos this either unfortunately. Ahh, the joys of editing.

The conditions for photography were pretty ordinary. The overcast sky was really bright and flat where as the actual weigh-in area and presser were held was comparatively dark. The only way I could get any detail in the sky and not get it to blow out would be to bring up the brightness of the stage with a couple flashes. As it was a public presser this wasn’t really possible as there was no barrier between the press and public.

See more of this gallery at: Sherdog