FEG held open “weigh-ins” (the fights had already officially weighed in) and a press conference at Shinjuku Station Square prior to Dream 9. Shinjuku Station is always a great place to hold a press conference as it is one of the busiest train stations in the world and so they can report massive attendance numbers. In reality, most of these people are just passers by and I have never actually seen any body count people at all here. Still, FEG told us there was about 5000 people here I think.

Lots of new faces in the media pit for this, all showing up for baseball taddle-tail Jose Canseco.

Canseco was facing Korean Techno Goliath Hong Man Choi. Canseco didn’t get any real training for this fight and I’m pretty sure he had never seen Choi until the weigh-ins. Divorces suck when you are/were rich apparently and Canseco must have needed some cash.

Everybody on forums and blogs were going crazy about how awesome the promo video for the Super Hulk tournament is. Here is something to think about though. I was informes by some members of the Japanese press that the guy who makes the promo packages for Dream and did for Pride, Daisuke Sato told FEG that he isn’t trying. He said what he is doing now is at 50% and if they want him to be back at the Pride level, they have to put on matches of Pride calliber. If this is indeed true, that takes some balls.

Asside from the Super Hulk rubbish, there were some awesome and legit fights on the card. A middleweight title fight, the featherweight grand prix second round, the return of Kid and JZ vs. Kawajiri. Definitely drool worthy stuff.

The guys over at all elbows did a fantastic video and photo series on Jason’s fight prep. Check it out for sure. They are really supremely talented.

After JZ’s fight against Joachim Hansen fell through at Dynamite!! on New Years Eve JZ was hanging around with not a lot to do. After the post fight press conference he invited me out for dinner with him and he is one of the most inspirational people I have ever met.

You get used to a certain kind of guy in the fight world and JZ is really one of a kind. All this talk about wanting to show the fans how much he loves them is completely genuine, he talks about love of friends and family more than anyone I have ever met.

He told me about growing up in Brazil and how his father and mother urged him to move to the States to futher his career and a lot of other personal stories from his childhood. He is really a great guy and I’ll probably remember that dinner for a long time. I had spagetthi and he had a huge pizza.

Photography notes

This was really a pretty difficult shoot. The natural light faded quickly through the presser and the artificial lighting was very uneven so I really needed to keep an eye on my exposure constantly.

The white balance was the most difficult thing though. There were four different temperature lightsources in play so the only option was to shoot auto white balance in RAW and correct it as best I could in post production.

This proved difficult too as it was rare that a fighter would just have one light source on them. Correcting for one part of a fighters face might leave the other parts blue or orange.

Unfortunately with pressers I have very little time to edit so I couldn’t afford to mess around too much, I just had to get the pictures up as soon as possible so I did the best I could in the time I had I think. RAW was a must in this situation though.

See the rest of the gallery at Sherdog.

Not sure why but Sherdog took ages to run this gallery. Valkyrie is GCM’s (Wajyutsu Keisyukai and Cage Force) womens organisation. This event was held on the same day as Cage Force but for some ridiculous reason they held the events at the same venue but about 3 hours apart. Also if you wanted to go to both events, you needed to buy tickets to both. I really dont understand why they would do this. It was pouring rain and no one had anywhere to go in the break as Differ Ariake is in the middle of nowhere.

To me it would make sense to have a slightly more expensive ticket for both events, have a 30 minute or one hour break in between the event, sell a ton of food and get much better attendance for both events.

The headliner was one of the top pound for pound female fighters in the world, Yuka Tsuji vs. American import Kate Martinez for the Valkyrie Featherweight title. Kate is a world title holding kickboxer and although she has a blue belt in jiu-jitsu, Tsuji is just way too good.

They are doing a tournament now for a shot at Tsuji. Coming into the tournament, Windy Tomomi had to be the favorite but one of my old stablemates at Alive (Hatsu Hioki’s gym) Kyoko Takabayashi came in and made short work of her.

Photography Notes

Differ is a wonderful place to shoot at. Reasonable lighting that is fairly even and good access to the runway for entrance shots. The cage often makes it tough with lighting though and it is not evenly spread around the edges of cages here. It’s about a one stop difference from the centre to the edges and about 2 stops if they are actually pressed against the cage on my side.

To get around this I either have to shoot the middle ground between the centre and edge of the cage which slightly overexposes and underexposes my photos respectively or I adjust my shutter speed on the fly.

Doing that can be very hard if you are not used to your camera. If a fight is moving really fast I just shoot the average but usually I adjust my shutterspeed depending on where the fighters are. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you are really confident though. If you forget to change your shutterspeed back or you somehow screw it up you can lose photos from an entire fight.

See the rest of the gallery at Sherdog.

Tatsuya Kawajiri and Hiroyuki Takaya put on an open training session for the press prior to their matches at Dream 9. “Session” is probably an over statement actually. For some reason, their trainer Takeshi Yamada chose to keep the media locked out of the gym and only let us in for one three minute round at the end. Also there was about 5 people in one small ring so getting shots of Kawajiri and Takaya was extremely difficult. Contrast this with Kid’s training session and you’ll see that these guys have something to learn about getting themselves press…

So I’m sure you can tell that I didn’t really enjoy this training session. I was really excited going into it but it simply didn’t provide many photo opportunites at all. Ahh, well. That’s the way they go sometimes I guess.

You can see the rest of the Kawajiri and Takaya galleries at Sherdog.

In a effort by FEG to finally get some decent ratings for their struggling “DREAM” promotion, they have teamed up with local boxing superstar, WBC Flyweight Champ Daisuke Naito. Naito’s upcoming title defence, will be aired together with DREAM so ratings should flow over from one into the other, giving the struggling promotion some huge numbers. To promote the coalition, DREAM poster boy KID Yamamoto and Naito held an open training session together. This was easily one of the toughest shoots I’ve ever done.

The amount of media here was ridiculous and it was the tiny Miyata Gym - where Naito trains. I managed to get a good position next to the ring but I couldn’t move my body at all to work for any better angles and I had a video camera resting on my head for a great deal of the time. The gym was really poorly lit so flash was a must to have any hope at stopping the action. Unfortunately, this was the same for every other photographer there so for every punch or kick thrown, about 30 other flashes went off - totally blowing everyone’s exposure and limiting my shot selection greatly. As if all of this wasn’t difficult enough it was 45 degrees in there as Naito had the heater on so he could cut weight! It’s no surprise that I was bedridden for 3 days after this.

Lots more of this kind of thing at Sherdog.

Shooto is definitely one of my favorite promotions, perhaps second only to the now defunct PRIDE FC. Great matchmaking, well thought out structure, transparent rankings and die hard fighters and fans make for one brilliant promotion. To mark their 20th anniversary, Shooto put together one of it’s best cards of all time.

Jordan Breen along with Tony Loiseleur put together a really excellent series on Shooto to commemorate the occasion which can be found here and here.

The main event was the Shooto Charisma, Rumina Sato against promotional favorite and 143lb World Champ “Lion” Takeshi Inoue. I’ve lost count at the number of unsuccessful attempts at the title Sato has made and I really hoped he would get one so he could die a happy man I fear it will always haunt him though. Still, Lion is a solid champ (although he did beat my coach Hiroyuki Abe in an absolutely cracking match) and completely dedicated to Shooto. He gave up a shot for big money and bigger fame in the Sengoku Featherweight Tournament. Says a lot about Shooto to me.

While Lion vs. Sato may have been the official main event of the night, the fight that really brought the fans out was fallen 154lb king Takanori Gomi vs Shooto World 154lb Champ, Takashi Nakakura. Nakakura has been one of my favorite fighters for a long time now and I actually picked him to win this. He took a while off a couple years back to rededicate himself to MMA and totally transformed himself. Still, although he put in a valiant effort against Gomi - after a slow start, Gomi came back and scored the KO.

Usually, in these big Shooto cards, they pad out the undercard with bouts that are good and usually important, but feature unknown fighters. They really went all out with this card though, the card was stacked from top to bottom with champs, former champs and the best pound for pound female in the world.

It was probably my favourite event of all time. Great fights featuring some of my favorite fighters with an amazing atmosphere. Add that to the prestige of the event and you have a winning combination.

Check out Jordan Breen’s follow up article and of course the full gallery at Sherdog.