First Tae Kwon Do (Western Australia) held its first grading examination recently, and I was on hand to capture some of the action. The venue was well lit, and the only lighting challenge was when shooting against external light, as you can see in one of the pictures below.
Here we see a crescent kick being executed defensively. Timing-wise, I don’t think it would have been possible to do better than this. A different angle could possibly have shown the sweeping action of the kicking leg a bit better.
Next is a take-down executed as part of a self-defence combination of techniques. Shooting a fraction of a second later, and with a longer exposure duration, would have captured some motion blur, which might portray the action better. A short exposure duration freezes the action, but this isn’t always necessarily desirable.
Free sparring is always a good opportunity for shooting some exciting action—in this case, we see a running jumping front snap kick, slightly before the peak moment of the technique.
The jumping back kick can be difficult to capture; timing is critically important as the martial artist is turning, and at the same time rising and falling as he/she jumps. A little too early, and you get a half-turned body. A little too late and the kick is over, with the legs already preparing for landing. This particular image took some work due to the tight framing, but I’d consider it my best photograph from the event.
Above is Master Vernon Low tying a new black belt onto a successful candidate. There were many other photographers at work, so getting a ‘clean’ angle to allow the viewer to focus completely on the activity at hand proved a little difficult at times.
Here we see some elbow strikes executed as part of a pattern of movements. At around f/2, depth of field is minimal, but the subject distance counterbalances that somewhat; the foreground subject is out of focus, but not too much so. Focus was obviously on the second subject from the lens, but an alternative approach (and the more conventional one) would have been to focus on the foreground subject at the left of the frame.
Here is the same subject captured a fraction of a second after the midpoint of a jumping front snap kick. The kick is still fully extended, but the supporting leg is already well on the way to landing. There is a ‘fan’ type of structure visible which I hadn’t noticed at the time of shooting; the subject’s right arm, right leg (kicking leg), and the right leg of the subject in the foreground make up a loose fan-like arrangement. If the leg in the foreground had been slightly higher, I suspect the arrangement would have been more aesthetically pleasing. This is a heavily cropped image from a landscape-oriented frame.