NEENAH, Wisc. – hookgrip™ and FitnessIQ, makers of the revolutionary Shake Weight®, are pleased to announce that the hookgrip brand, website, twitter account and Facebook page have been acquired by FitnessIQ. Terms of the acquisition have not been announced.

Johann Verheem, the inventor of the Shake Weight, had the following to say: “We at FitnessIQ are thrilled to acquire the hookgrip brand as we look to expand our business into oscillating barbells and the CrossFit community. hookgrip provides us with the perfect entry point into this market for our upcoming Shake Weight for Weightlifters.”

Nat Arem, owner and founder of the hookgrip brand, stated that he is “very excited about oscillating barbells” and “has been using the Shake Weight since it launched.” He also added that he feels like bringing the Shake Weight community together with the Olympic-style weightlifting community is the next logical step for both groups.

The companies and founders are also mutually excited about the prospect for sequence posters of well-known Olympic-style weightlifters using the latest in Shake Weight technology.

For more information, please visit hookgrip.com or shakeweight.com.

First of all, I should say that photography is a very complicated and in-depth subject that takes a long time to master. I am far from a master at photography. However, although many professional photographers won’t admit it, you can get pictures that look almost as good as theirs if you just know a couple of basic settings and you have good equipment. I would say that 80% of good photography is just about being in the right spot ready to shoot with the right equipment. In addition, weightlifting photography has a couple of small quirks so I will do my best to address the basics in this blog.

At it’s core, photography is about recording light. The more light you have, the easier it is record the scene in front of you. Low light situations are difficult because you often butt up against the capabilities of the camera/lens and you need to make decisions about what to sacrifice (I will explain more later). Unfortunately, most weightlifting photography is not only low light (hard to shoot), it’s also high speed (can be very difficult in low light). The upside is that the platform is pretty small and weightlifting is predictable in that you know what the lifter is going to do next.

So when a camera records light, there are three main settings that you need to be aware of: shutter speed, aperture and ISO.

• Shutter speed is self explanatory but it’s basically how long the shutter opens to expose light to the sensor (in digital cameras, the sensor replaces the film). In weightlifting photography, it’s essential to have a minimum shutter speed of 1/250th second or faster. You will get blurry images if you try to shoot at 1/200th or slower. And ideally, you will take your images at 1/400th or 1/500th of a second. Usually any faster than 1/500th of a second is overkill because not much moves that quickly. Only go faster than 1/500th of a second at a very well-lit event.
• The second setting is aperture. Maximum aperture is determined by the quality of your lens and it’s basically how much light your lens can let in. Aperture is usually listed like 1.4, 2.0, 2.8, etc. In general, the lower the aperture number is, the better (and also much more costly). The downside to using an aperture like 1.4 (ie, very wide opening in your lens) is that you get a shallow depth of field which makes it hard to keep things in focus. The upside to an aperture like 1.4 is that you get a LOT more light and you can either use a higher shutter speed (easier to freeze motion) or lower ISO (less grain).
• Thirdly, ISO is the speed at which your camera’s sensor records light. When shooting weightlifting indoors, you’ll often need to use a high ISO value because you’ll need all of the light you can get in a short period of time. The downside to a high ISO is that you will get noise/grain in the image. The number that you can push your camera to on the ISO range varies greatly. Some older cameras start to look bad at ISO 800 whereas some of the state-of-the-art high-end cameras can be pushed to higher than ISO 10,000 before things start to look bad. Of course, those cameras start at $4000 and go up from there so they do not come cheap. And that’s without a lens.

Photography is largely about finding ways to balance the three main settings as all of them increase/decrease your ability to record light and each one has upsides/downsides as you change them in either direction. Finding the right balance for the subject matter and your equipment is what a good photographer does. Since your shutter has to be at least 1/250th for weightlifting (or anything fast, for that matter), you can select that setting and then decide on ISO and aperture. The first thing that I do is put my camera on shutter priority (which means I am determining the shutter and my camera is determining the aperture) and set 1/250th. Then I take a few test shots at various ISOs (I don’t use auto ISO for weightlifting) usually starting around 1600. I will go as high as 6400 if need be. Usually I pick an ISO where things are still look reasonably good (typically between 2500 and 5000) and then I just let the camera pick the aperture — which happens automatically on shutter priority. If the aperture is not maxed out (ie, if the camera is shooting at f/4 and I have an f/2.8 lens) then I will typically bump up the shutter speed to 1/320th, 1/400th or 1/500th which will almost always cause the aperture to “max out”. I don’t normally go above 1/500th shutter speed. I always review my pictures to check for clarity (zoom in on a part of their body that is moving in the shot to check for blur), brightness, focus, etc. If I notice something off, I adjust it. If I’m having trouble keeping lifters in focus, I might switch to manual mode so I can control the aperture and increase the depth of field (ie, make it easier to keep lifters in focus). If I notice my shots are blurry, then I will increase the shutter speed.

This should give you a basic idea for how to do weightlifting photography as far as the basic settings go. But settings can only take you so far. It’s invaluable to have good equipment. If you have a $500 camera bundle from Best Buy, you will not be able to get great weightlifting photo results in a dark room no matter what you do with your settings. The two big things to look for are a camera with a good sensor and a lens with a low aperture number (2.8 or lower is essential, lenses like 18-55 f/3.5-5.6 that come with many camera kits will not do a good job indoors). Of course, good sensors and big apertures (the lower the number, the bigger the aperture) are expensive. Sometimes very expensive. That’s just the reality of high quality photography. If you are on a shoe string, I would recommend getting a fast “prime” lens (ie, one that does not zoom) as you get a lot more for your money with prime lenses. At the very least, if you have a fast prime lens, you will be able to record a lot more light. You can see an example of one of these in the images below — look for the lens that has 85mm 1.8D written on it — I used that lens as my primary lens at the 2012 American Open because it was so dark and I needed as much aperture as possible.

Here is a gallery with pictures of some of my favorite equipment:

I primarily shoot with a Nikon D700 with an MB-D10 grip (which ups the frames per second from five to eight, making sequence shots better) and a 70-200 f/2.8 Nikon lens. I also sometimes use my 85mm f/1.8 lens (useful for low light). And at the Olympics, I was forced to use a teleconverter which gave me more zoom but reduce my maximum aperture. As it turns out, the Olympics were very well lit so it did not matter that I shot most of it with a maximum aperture of 4.8 (which lets in way less light than 2.8, which is what my lens would be without the teleconverter). But I needed the zoom reach because the audience was so far away from the platform so it was worth taking the hit on the aperture.

In total, the pictured equipment runs maybe $5000 to $6000 on the used market. But even this equipment isn’t all top-of-the-line — especially the body. I’m looking to pick up either a Nikon D3S (about $4000) or Nikon D4 (about $5500) to use in 2013 as those are the best camera bodies to use for weightlifting photography. I will continue to use my 70-200 f/2.8 and I will use my other lenses and teleconverters as needed. Thanks for reading and please let me know if you have any questions!

We also have a twitter (where we plan to be more active) and a youtube (which has some of our VERY popular 2011 CrossFit Games videos on it). Right now the full site is under development and being prepared for launch hopefully in the very near future.

One common question that we get asked is why the site isn’t launched yet. To answer that question, I need to explain a bit about how the idea for hookgrip developed. Back in 2010, I was working my normal job (which is running websites) and I realized that I wanted to launched a website about fitness. I wasn’t sure about what. At the time I was doing CrossFit on a daily basis at CrossFit Las Vegas and my initial inclination was that I wanted to launch a website about CrossFit. But I wasn’t sure what the site would be about. I had a few ideas but I really wasn’t super enthused about any of them. In June 2010, CrossFit Las Vegas held an Olympic-style weightlifting seminar taught by John Broz and some of his lifters (including Pat Mendes). I was instantly drawn to the sport. Of course I’d done some CrossFit-style Olympic lifting but I’d never focused on one, two and three rep maxes before. I soon went over to Average Broz Gym for a followup training session and before I knew it I had a garage gym complete with a platform, squat rack and Eleiko bar/bumpers. Around this time, I decided once and for all that my “fitness” site was going to be a mix of Olympic-style weightlifting and CrossFit. So my first move was to look for a domain. I thought about purchasing a high dollar domain such as weightlifting.com (they want six figures, blah) and I found a few others that I liked (secondpull.com, which I have since gifted away) but the one that really stood out to me was hookgrip.com which I registered for $7 — and thus saved a good amount of money by not invested several hundred or thousand into an existing domain. So I picked up hookgrip.com in August 2010. There was a problem though. I was still under contract to my old employer and I was contractually bound to not start any new projects. So, with that, I decided to wait on the project until I was allowed to get going on it.

Fast forward to April 15th, 2011. Without boring you by going into my past work too extensively, I worked for a poker marketing company. We ran sites like pocketfives.com and pokersoftware.com — all sites about poker but you could not actually gamble on any of them (for legal reasons, we did not want to actually take bets). So on April 15th, there was an event known as Black Friday. Once again, without boring you, the basic story is that it threw the whole poker industry into turmoil — including our company. I decided that I should accelerate my plans to start other websites and leave the company. I ended up agreeing to leave the company as of August 1st, 2011. However, the 2011 CrossFit Games were scheduled to occur just before August 1st so I essentially stopped working a few days early and took off to volunteer at the Games and hopefully get some good content. I ended up having a great time and I managed to get some cool slow motion videos, including this one of Camille Leblanc-Bazinet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKcnpJSAsbo. That video now has over 400,000 views! Pretty crazy. That being said, while I collected a bunch of content and enjoyed the Games, I also interacted with a number of CFHQ employees at that event and I did not get the feeling that my ideas for a CrossFit-related site would be all that appreciated or enjoyed. I also did not want to subject my site to the whims of a privately-held organization. So that trip convinced me that Olympic-style weightlifting was the way to go.

There was just one problem. I needed some content for the site (ie, pictures) and there wasn’t anything that I was excited about going to see until the World Weightlifting Championship in Paris, France. And that was being held in early November of 2011. So on August 18, 2011 I booked my flight to Paris and eagerly awaited getting started on this vision that was, at that point, over a year old! In the meantime I accepted a contract to work for a different company through the end of the year and, as it turned out, I kept working for that company through the end of March 2012. In the meantime, I shot a number of pictures at both the Paris Worlds and the 2012 US Nationals in Columbus. I didn’t get around to posting pictures much until February of 2012 mainly due to the contract work. And, since March, I’ve been working on and off on both hookgrip and my other projects (I need to keep making an income in the meantime!). So that brings us to now, early December of 2012. It’s amazing that this idea is nearly 2.5 years old and it still isn’t launched as a full website. Most of that delay is due to my other employment obligations but I will admit that I have not been totally proactive about finding a way to get it launched no matter what. That should change now, due to a number of factors.

I can’t go into all of the ideas for hookgrip but the basic idea is that it will be a weightlifting information site unlike any other. I feel like weightlifting information, products, media and other info is very difficult to come by. I want to change that. It should be a lot easier than it is and that’s my #1 goal with hookgrip. Make weightlifting accessible and publish tons of great content. Hopefully that gives you an idea about how hookgrip came about and why it has taken so long for the full website to be launched. Stay tuned to the facebook page for daily updates and look for the new site soon!