Master Vernon Low visited Perth recently to examine First Tae Kwon Do Western Australian students for promotion in rank. Although many people take holidays over the Australian summer (which obviously coincides with the Christmas and New Year period), there was an impressive number of candidates ready for the first grading of 2018.
On this occasion I was shooting with my 50 mm lens rather than my usual 85 mm lens, but even so, it was difficult to capture the scale of the grading examination. A wide-angle lens would have done it more justice.
Most of the pictures above show candidates at various stages of their patterns—prearranged sequences of techniques, perhaps more widely known by the Japanese term ‘kata.’ In Korean, various terms are preferred by different Tae Kwon Do organisations: ‘hyung,’ ‘tul,’ and ‘poomsae’ are all in use.
In contrast to patterns, free sparring provides opportunities for spontaneous action pictures, which take a lot more effort on the part of the photographer. Vigilance and successful prediction of the flow of action are essential, and a camera able to shoot at a fast frame rate can be very helpful, too.
The photograph above shows a group of candidates executing a jumping front snap kick. They are all at slightly different stages of the technique and, in a way, this gives an overview of the technique in a single picture. Most of the candidates in the second line have just taken off or are still climbing in their jumps. The boy at the far right has just executed his kick. The two girls in the middle of the front line have just landed. The boy at the far left has landed and his lead foot is coming down to the floor after having been retracted from the kicking action.
In a more typical photograph of such action, we would ideally want all of the candidates to be simultaneously at the peak moment of action, just upon execution of the kicking action. (Similar to the first few photographs above, but with the candidates in the air.) Although not ‘picture perfect’ in one sense, I think the last photograph is interesting in its own right—allow your eye to travel from the middle to the right along the second line of candidates, then back from right to left along the front line, and you should see the progress of the technique from pre-kick to post-kick.