Saturday World Champs Training

Needing to get back into the groove of photographing Taekwon-do action I dropped in on the Auckland World Champs Saturday training session. They train from 1-4pm each Saturday in the Mt Wellington gym. The last couple of weeks I've turned up an hour before they finish... by that time they're hot, sweaty and tiring.

This Saturday Carl and a couple of others were practicing their high kicks. It's always challenging to get the timing right - at point of impact - and after a few misses on my part the practice started paying off.

I also played around with very high ISO settings for use in very low light situations - like the awful lighting conditions we had in the stadium in Italy last year. Anyway, it gives a pretty grainy result but when converted to B&W looks quite nice.

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think about them.



Cheers
Doug

Getting in close in Black and White

Been playing around with these photos that I took and published a couple of weeks ago. Wanted to try and get in really close and give the feel of what it might be like to be sparring, to really show the intensity of it up close.



Cheers
Doug

Impact Mt Wellington Club Opening

This was a great evening. Congratulations to Ms Carolina Dillen in the very successful opening night for her new Impact Taekwon-do Club.



Cheers
Doug

Capturing the sweat and intensity of World Champs training

I dropped in on Mr Steve Pellow's Auckland world Champs training tonight to start getting back up to speed with photographing sparring. The intensity of the training was great to watch and made for some great action shot opportunities.



Cheers
Doug

Pick of the Pix Series, Focused Men

Specs: 1/200s, 300.0mm, f/5.6, ISO: 800

Steve Pellow gives Christine Topia a pep talk between rounds of her endless battle in the 2007 World Champs.

Here's our commentary from her matches...
Christine Topia vs Canada – junior female middle-weight sparring:
The Canadian is fast, Christine manages to cut her off well though and scores with her long arms and legs effectively.
Win

Christine Topia vs Germany – junior female middle-weight sparring:
Both fighters clash legs a lot when they try to move in. Christine scores well with her turning kick on her way out. She dominates with her hands and takes advantage of her height advantage. Really close round.
Draw
Round three is much the same as the first two rounds, Christine looks as though she is slightly ahead on points by the end, but again – it’ll be close.
Draw
Sudden death. This round goes for about 5 minutes. Both start slow – not wanting to give anything away. A couple of short flurries follow but the referee doesn’t want to go to the flags just yet. After about three minutes the referee still hasn’t stopped the match. The German comes in with a sidekick, Christine moves to the side and scores with a jab – finally the referee stops the match – 2 flags for Christine – match continues. Another couple of scoring flurries go unnoticed by the referee and towards the end the match had become regular free sparring. After a long round, the German is awarded three flags.
Loss
Photos of Christine...


To get back onto the subject of focused men, you might have guessed I love taking portrait type images of people in action. Here are a couple more from around this time...


Specs: 1/125s, 55.0mm, f/5.0, ISO: 1600

Jon Sawdon about to practice a break or something similar a day or two before the 2007 World Champs


Specs: 1/13s, 28.0mm, f/4.5, ISO: 100

Yours truly in central Quebec tasting some great coffee and food in a genuine French bakery.

"Give me back my camera!" - I put this photo in just to show that I'm not always the one behind the lens.

And at only 1/13th of a second (a very slow shutter speed) it shows the power of these modern image stabalised lenses to capture a sharp image where it would normally be virtually impossible.

Master Van de Mortel Auckland Seminar

Our friend Master Willy Van de Mortel is on a tour of New Zealand running Taekwon-do training sessions and today was running one in Auckland. I dropped in when they only had two hours to go to catch some of the sweat and action!

I haven't photographed in the Auckland Grammar gym before and assumed that it would be difficult given how dark it is but I enjoyed it and caught a few interesting shots.



Cheers
Doug

Polish Training Session - Auckland

I turned up about an hour before the end of today's Auckland Training Session to take a few pictures and to shake the dust off my camera.

Pictures of the workouts:



Some more creative pictures:



Cheers
Doug