Photo By: Robert Abitia
Chrono300 started with a snap no not the snap of a camera shutter, it was after I snapped my ACL while playing paintball at Redlands Paintball Park. I had no idea what I was doing at the time, I just knew that I wanted to be with my friends at the field. I had toyed with photographing paintball using a $100 video/camera before the accident and the bug began. But being a player turned photographer was no easy thing in 2004 as I would find out after being turned down for a field pass at the NPPL Huntington Beach event. Those words still haunt me to this day “who are you shooting for?” and I knew right then and there the right answer was not for myself. I came back to my local field trying to come up with a cool sounding name “like” 300fps and P8NT but those cool names had already been taken. I walked (as in hopped around on crutches) around and started looking at things and tried to come up with a name, the first thing I came across was the chrono and the name Chrono300 just popped in my head and even though I looked around for hours I could not come up with a better name.
Look I was real lucky no doubt about it, I lived where the hottest teams in the world practiced and I had a few great friends from the Redlands field that really turned out to be the biggest step up you could ask for. Mike Paxson and Bea Youngs (now Bea Paxson) practiced at my local field and I had became pretty good friends with them. I started out just shooting them and whoever came out to Redlands to practice like Dynasty, Infamous, The Bushwackers and countless other teams. The biggest turn for me was a rookie team that was sweeping just about every tournament in the country called LTZ (Less Than Zero) who Mike Paxson was the coach of. I was shooting practices just about every weekend until the kids in LTZ asked me to take pictures of them at a Best In The West Tournament Series at Tombstone Paintball Park in Corona California. At that event I had no idea what I was doing but man did I have the best time, I had the bug of being a photographer and Chrono300 from that day became more for the players than for myself.
Years have now past and I have put down the camera to play/coach for a season and even went away school to become a better photographer. In all that time I continued to shoot paintball just not with the same passion as the days past. I have held on to the galleries, the friends and my love of the sport and I just feel like I am ready to come back and shoot the sport again with the same passion.
I hope that I can capture a few special moments like these images that have been luck enough to have made. Please do not judge my work from the past, these images mean a lot to me even though they are not perfect, they are of friends and of the game I love. I hope you enjoy my work, please drop me a line at michael@chrono300.com if you have any questions or comments. And if you would like to show your support for what I do just hit me up at the field for a few stickers and place them on your hopper or gear, nothing makes me feel better than to pull the camera to my eye and see a Chrono300 sticker.
Michael
