Local hero Ricardo Cortes returned to Miller Lite Fight Night last Thursday and I was there to capture the images. My selection of images is now on-line so check them out and let me know what you think.
As I develop experience ring-side, I’m starting to become a little more disappointed in Cortes. At 19-1-1 with 14 KOs one might think that San Jose could have a big-time money-earner on its hands. While Cortes does show terrific strength in both hands and an imposing jab, I fear that his long experience with lower class boxers has fostered some bad habits: dropping his hands and leaning in on his straight punches. I suspect that we’re going to see him get knocked out when he steps up.
In the third fight of the evening, Arturo Quintero put a hurting on Ulises Pena. Eight rounds of junior lightweight punishment left the slower, defenseless Pena on the canvas a couple of times. But I’ll be damned if he didn’t demonstrate a wolverine’s tenacity and propensity to inflict fatal damage in its dying throes. With his arms cycling like a mechanical wheat thresher he kept the crowd on their feet right up to the final bell. The decision wasn’t even close.
Other fights included the not-so-foxy-boxing semi-main event featuring two physical female boxers that produced more tangled arms than clean blows. In bout two James Toney’s separated-at-birth twin Teke Oruh put a technical beating on Shaun Ross that resulted in an easy unanimous decision. And the first fight between Marvin Whitlock (pro debut) and Hector Martinez went so fast that by the time Whitlock was counted out I barely had my lens cap off.
I ran some more experiments with the technical details of photography and confirmed the damage of snapping shots at ISO 1600. That bought me a deeper depth of field but introduced a distracting about of noise into the shots. I took three of the four shots in JPG and it doesn’t appear that those shots are any worse than the RAW ones.