Saturday 11 July 2009

First World Champs Full Team Training



This afternoon was the first time the whole World Champs Team have assembled as one for training since the team selection trials at the end of May. The Star Series tournament in Wellington is tomorrow and the team have arrived the day before for this two hour training session before participating in the tournament tomorrow.

Jermey, Mark and I are staying with friends in Wellington. Ross Becker is a very keen photographer and I twisted his arm to come along with his amazing kit (I'm just a wee bit jealous) and try out Taekwon-Do photography. Our first reaction to the gym at Wellington College where the training was held was "oh the light is so poor". It was pretty dark, the lighting was old and weak, and it would therefore be very challenging.

Anyway, we went mad for 2 hours with me taking just over 1,000 images and Ross just over 2,000. His Canon 1D Mark III camera can take bursts of 10/second which make wonderful sequences of jumps and patterns and the like. My 40D will take just over 5/second but only for 10-15 images before it changes to "go-slow" due to my memory cards being a bit old and slow.

One of Ross's images:


It took a fair while to sort through those 3,000 images and here are a few of the better ones. I've held back a few of the excellent images and will work on them and publish them with my daily posts over the coming weeks. That way hopefully I'll get you to come back and check this site again!

Doug and Ross swapped cameras for a while towards the end of the session so we can't tell who the photographer was in all cases. These ones are mainly mine....


And these ones are mainly Ross's...


Ross started taking them in colour and then changed his camera to its black and white mode like I was using.