{"id":2179,"date":"2018-01-22T05:00:28","date_gmt":"2018-01-21T21:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ywo.id.au\/blog\/?p=2179"},"modified":"2025-02-23T21:16:29","modified_gmt":"2025-02-23T13:16:29","slug":"january-2018-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/2018\/01\/22\/january-2018-action\/","title":{"rendered":"January 2018 action"},"content":{"rendered":"

First Tae Kwon Do Western Australian instructors and black belt members gathered recently for a summer training session. One aspect of the martial art that received attention was the set of two-step sparring exercises taught by Master Vernon Low. This is part of a series of exercises that gradually develop students’ sparring (simulated combat) skills. Like most activities that take place in a set manner, this gives good opportunities for action photographs, as it is easier to be in the right place at the right time to capture the action.<\/p>\n

Unlike the fastest activities involved in martial art training, such as free sparring, the fixed nature of two-step sparring exercises also presents a challenge: how do we capture the sense of motion in our images?<\/p>\n

One option would be to set a longer exposure duration and pan with the action. The difficulty here is that this might not always make for a good picture in this context\u2014while some techniques, such as punches, are generally linear (and thus suitable candidates for panning shots), most blocking or parrying techniques will be circular to varying extents. To the untrained eye, a blur of motion in a different plane than the primary movement could be confusing.<\/p>\n

Another option would be to try to capture the peak moment of action. In this case, we are looking at parts of the subjects that capture the sense of motion\u2014such as belts, or long hair. In the photograph below, motion is implied by the position of the belt worn by the instructor on the left. She has just come to a stop as she completes the blocking motion with her left forearm, but her belt has continued moving in the same direction as she herself was a moment ago.<\/p>\n

\"First
FTKD two-step sparring, January 2018<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the next three photographs, we can again see the implied motion in the second picture (in portrait orientation), but not the first and third pictures, which were captured after the subjects (and their belts) had come to a more or less complete halt.<\/p>\n

\"First
FTKD two-step sparring, January 2018<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"First
FTKD two-step sparring, January 2018<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"First
FTKD two-step sparring, January 2018<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The photograph below is of a turning kick executed during a more spontaneous form of sparring, and motion is clearly implied by the hair and belt of the instructor on the right, even though the exposure duration was short (1\/500 s).<\/p>\n

\"First
FTKD turning kick, January 2018<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This time around, I was shooting with my 50 mm f\/1.8 lens rather than my 85 mm f\/1.4 lens. In some of the photographs above, this might be noticeable through the greater depth of field (despite being shot at a large f\/2 aperture) and, in some cases, the broader field of view. The 50 mm lens is more flexible and more forgiving than the 85 mm lens, in many ways. Adjusting framing is easy enough to do by cropping in post-processing, even to the point of changing the final image’s orientation (e.g., the portrait-oriented picture above was actually shot in landscape orientation). But the 85 mm lens gives images that separate the subject from the background better, both in terms of apparent subject-to-background distance and shallower depth of field.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First Tae Kwon Do Western Australian instructors and black belt members gathered recently for a summer training session. One aspect of the martial art that received attention was the set of two-step sparring exercises taught by Master Vernon Low. This is part of a series of exercises that gradually develop students’ sparring (simulated combat) skills.… Continue reading January 2018 action<\/span> →<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[278,70,217,222,24,260,277],"class_list":["post-2179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-martial-arts","tag-ftkd","tag-martial-arts","tag-nikkor-af-50-1-8","tag-nikkor-af-85-1-4","tag-sparring-action","tag-tkd","tag-vernon-low"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2179"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4135,"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2179\/revisions\/4135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}