I’ve been photographing LA’s amazing women’s roller derby league as a fan for over a year and as one of the league photographers for a few months. For someone who was never very interested in sports, either as a spectator or participant, my enthusiasm for roller derby is pretty surprising, but it really is one of my favorite things to do in LA and one of my favorite things to photograph. Earlier this year, I got the book Hard Knocks: Rolling with the Derby Girls that features some truly amazing medium format film photography by Shelly Calton. Inspired by this, I brought a roll of black and white 35mm film to last weekend’s game to see what I could capture. The Doll Factory is dark and the skaters are fast so this was a bit of an experiment for me. But I love black and white film and the grain and moodiness somehow just work for the subject, so this is definitely something I will doing more of in the future. The digital photos are up on flickr, but here are a few of my favorite film shots.
Taken with the Canon AE-1 camera, 50mm 1.8 lens, Kodak BW 400 CN