UFC 66

Las Vegas- Chuck Liddell vs. Tito Ortiz part 2.

Lunch pail Chuck did his job on pretty boy Tito Ortiz. Ortiz, the Huntington Beach, CA fighter with a porn star girlfriend, didn't have any answers to the onslaught of punches by Liddell. Ortiz took quite a beating before the bout was stopped in the third round.

Ortiz was a little upset in the post-fight press conference that the referee stopped the fight. But he did acknowledge that he was beat.

The matches before Liddell/Ortiz was like watching the warm-up bands play before the headliner. The crowd itself included some headliners like Leonardo DiCaprio, Wayne Newton, Mario Lopez, Kid Rock, Andre Agassi and his wife, Steffi Graff.

Taking photos of the match can be difficult because of the cage in front of you. Most of the time you have to manually focus. This time I experimented with using a switch on my Canon 70-200mm lens that allows me only to focus at subjects greater than 3 meters or greater. I figured that would stop my lens from focusing on the fence in front of me. For any photos closer than 3 meters I would use my second camera body with a wide-angle lens. It worked out great as I was able to use my auto-focus when Liddell won the match and started celebrating.

You can see more photos on my sportshooter.com page

Awards Season

Beverly Hills - On December 14th, the Awards Season officially began at 5:15 a.m. That was when the Golden Globe nominations were announced at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

The Awards Season extends the Holiday Season a couple of extra months for those in Hollywood. Its the time of gift bags, lavish parties and acknowledgements for the nominees. Nominations by themselves are victories. A recent ad on television for "DreamGirls" stated that it had "won" five Golden Globe nominations. Coming in second, third, fourth or fifth, is still a win.

Covering a nominations ceremony require either pulling an all-nighter or going to bed at 6 p.m. I've done both, neither is good. The reason for the early start is that fact that they announce them on the West Coast, which is three hours earlier than the East Coast, and they want the publicity of a live broadcast on the morning TV shows and the whole day's news cycle. Maximum coverage.

The Grammy's, the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Academy Awards all have the early start time. They also bring in some talent to announce the awards and do a round of press interviews afterwards. The Globes brought in a trio of actors, Matthew Perry, Jessica Biel, and Rosario Dawson. It's over and done with pretty quickly and then there is a mad flurry of activity afterwards as reporters pound out their stories, TV does their live shots and publicists call their clients to tell the good or bad news.

A nomination can make someone's career. Hilary Swank started her Oscar run with a surprising Golden Globe nomination and win for "Boy's Don't Cry". The nominations that stirred the pot this year were Sasha Baron Cohen for "Borat" and Mel Gibson for "Apocalypto", which he directed, written and produced. The media loves a good storyline and with those two along with some high profile stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Beyonce Knowles, Johnny Depp, and Brad Pitt, this should be a decent Awards Season.

A tale of two events

Los Angeles - All things Tinseltown have a veneer of fake. Premieres and award shows are on the top rung of fakery.

Friday, I went to Spike TV's annual Video Game Awards. Anyone can create an award show with the right mix of stars and sponsors. As the video game industry as grown to the size of the movie industry in dollars and cents, they too have to have an award show.

Gaming is not as mature as the movie industry, so the award show is a little on the early adopter cycle of viewership. They wrangled a few stars, Samuel L. Jackson was the host, and the f-bombs were flying all over the show, which of course will be bleeped out when aired.

Spike TV thought the mix of tough guys like Sam Jackson and 50 cent. With a sprinkling of eye candy of Eva Mendes and Tila Tequila, whose claim to fame is she has 1.4 million friends on her MySpace page, (http://www.myspace.com/tilatequila) would be the right mix for those fanboys of video games. They kinda missed the mark with comic Sarah Silverman who basically ended the show making fun of the target audience with jokes about how video games have lowered the STD count in America. She was funny but only in the press room, not in the Galen Center, where they held the event.

For a different take on Spike TV's VGA, click here.

Contrast that with the premiere of "Charlotte's Web" on Sunday morning at the Arclight Theatre on Sunset. Their were A-list stars like Julia Roberts, Dakota Fanning, Kathy Bates, Reba McEntire, Lauren Holly and Bridget Fonda.

The weekend premieres in Hollywood are for children's movies, the stars walk the red carpet with kids in tow. Christine Taylor, actor and wife of Ben Stiller brought her daughter along and stopped for a few photos until the little one had enough of the flashes and started to cry. She quickly scooped her up and ran to the theater, effectively ending the photo session at that point.

The snappers who awoke early to get to this premiere to make a few photos of Julia Roberts were disappointed. She committed the three cardinal sins to photographers. One, she wore black. Two, she had sunglasses on. Three, she had her hair up. The only thing worse is if she didn't show up at all.

The reason why photographers don't want a big star wearing black, is that the magazines don't want to have pages with celebs in black, especially if they are wearing a black coat, which Julia was. Black is boring. A coat that covers everything up is boring. Pants are boring.

The second is sunglasses. Okay, if your Stevie Wonder. But people want to know what stars look like. A shot of a celeb without sunglasses will make the magazines many more times than with.

The third is hair up. Hair up is when you go do errands. Not a premiere. We are not talking about hair up that took hours to do here, we are talking hair-up that took two seconds before she went out the door. Readers want glamour.

I know, its Julia Roberts, so its not like all the world isn't going to use the photos this week, its next week, or next month, those photos will be worthless.