Pride Bowl 2025 Recap
What a tournament! This is the second Pride Bowl tournament and the third National Gay Flag Football League (NGFFL) tournament that I've covered in some capacity. The one change from last year's Pride Bowl to this one is that I also captained a team which is always an extraordinary amount of work. But I am so passionate about CMSA Flag Football and this event that I don't particularly mind the hectic weekend.
This shoot was set up in three parts - cover the opening party at Sidetrack, the closing party at Metro, and then whatever football gameplay shots that I can get when I have a free minute. Unfortunately, my team got knocked out of the tournament in the first game of day 2, but the silver lining is that I got to capture some great content for the athletes that traveled to Chicago to attend this event.
One of my favorite parts of shooting this tournament is that there are multiple places where fields are side-by-side, so I can shoot a play on one field and then do a quick 180 to get the play on the field opposite. Double the content in the same amount of time! The tricky part about this last year was the direction of the sun and the resulting shadows on my DSLR Nikon D3400 which I ended up retiring earlier this year. I did not have a high rate of success on the field where the sun was in front of me due to the capabilities of that camera, the shooting in JPEG instead of RAW, and the editing capabilities of the native Mac Photos application. The progress I've made from last year to this year in understanding what I need out of camera bodies, glass, and editing tools has been significant, and I'm ecstatic about how this set turned out.
The next piece of kit that I would like to get is a better speedlight flash for indoor shoots - I had bought a relatively inexpensive one from Amazon when I had first started. It does the job fine, but I feel like I get inconsistent results in the intensity of the flash, it seems uncomfortable for my subjects if I accidentally go one setting too high, and I was getting these strange phantom flashes when I was not taking a picture or pressing the shutter button.
Kit for this shoot is the Nikon ZF camera body, the Tamron 150-500mm f5-6.7 lens for the field, and my old f-mount 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 for the indoor shots that had come with the D3400 kit. I also got some bonus shots of the drag show with my newer 85mm f1.8 lens that I absolutely adore. Some highlights and favorite shots below!
