Thursday 10 September 2009

Pick of the Pix Series, Coach and Student


Lens 85.0mm, 1/1000s, f/3.2, ISO: 100

This was taken during the last training session prior to the 2008 World Cup. We're up on the roof of the hotel and it's a beautiful morning. I manage to capture quite a few nice images in this session.

I really like this image. It's captured Mark Trotter critiquing and coaching Jeremy Hanna on his patterns. Jeremy went on to win gold for 3rd Dan junior male patterns and Mark's influence on Jeremy's development has been substantial. Mark is co-instructor at Impact where Jeremy is a senior student. Both people are pretty special to me so that makes the image probably more significant to me than to others. Things I like about it are the positioning of the subjects. Jeremy is receiving the attention and he is sharply in focus. Mark is intentionally out of focus but you can easily tell that it is him. His body language and expression conveys his interest and critical inspection of what Jeremy is doing. They both have splashes of colour in their clothing adding further visual excitement. The background is pretty clean and uncluttered. It is a pity there are people behind Mark but there were a lot of kiwis up on the roof this day and I was lucky to be able to get the background as clean as it is.