February 9th, 2002
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Off to Washington D.C. again to visit Chris and Kelly. This time, the weekend
was already planned out with a martial arts tournament on Saturday. The tournament is
Charlie Lee Karate - 2002 World Series
and it's packed with probably 500+ competitors of all ages, ranks and styles. There was no way in hell I was gonna
compete... These guys have trained for months for this tournament and I just don't have that kind of free time.
But I did have time to take LOTS of pictures on Saturday. I took about 7 or 8 rolls of film, just trying to get different angles and different action shots. I recently finished studying the NYI course on Sports Photography, so I was hoping to try out some of what I learned. The truth of the matter is that it is all about location and timing. Location does nothing if you're not there at the right time, and taking the picture at the right time is only worth it if you have a good angle. After studying the pictures I took, I learned a bit. For the first set of forms, I was standing too close with the wrong lens. Plus I needed a flash with a faster cycle time to get more of the shots I wanted. Either that or wait for the best shot and take fewer. The problem with these 'free' forms is that I have no idea (neither do the judges) of what the artist is about to do. Are they in position for a front flip or a back flip? Or are they just going to punch and kick? You just have to hope for the best. If you wait until you see the action to take the shot, you're waiting too late. For the last set of forms, the finals competition, I was in the right place, but I needed a better lens and a tripod. I had to stand on a chair from the back of the auditorium to make sure I was out of the way and to get over the crowd. Somewhere in the auditorium was a chair ninja who kept telling me to stop standing on the hotel furniture. After a few rounds she went away, so I was able to stand up for a while. I did not ake any pictures of the fighting. There was no way I could be in the right place for it and it's just not impressive unless you have a good angle and the right timing. (The fights were generally boxing matches anyway, so it wasn't real impressive.)
Wushu!
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In between the first set and the final set of forms, I was able to shoot over to a side
competition to get a few photos of one of my old VT friends, Dimitry, and a few JMU students. JMU is hosting
an inter-collegiate TKD scrimmage the same weekend I am heading to Florida (Feb 24th), so I won't be able to go to that.
The sacrifices I have to make for friends! :)
The JMU Tae Kwon Do website is located at:
Form order:
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The funniest part of the weekend has to have been Saturday night after the tournament.
There was a group of us that went out to T.G.I.Friday's for some food and drink. It was Chris, Kelly, myself, Gerald,
Pallo, Melissa (?), Tina, and Chao Dong Xing (or DX for short). DX is the person in the pictures to the left. He scored
perfect 10's for his form during the finals competition! He's being doing Wushu since the age of six, when he
moved out of his parent's house into the academy. I don't know his whole story, but I learned quite a bit of it
over dinner and drinks. Tina, his wife, is an excellent translator and is an amazing person. Between her and her
husband, I could listen to their stories and tales from China for weeks.
What started out as a simlpe "Let's get DX a shot!", turned into DX drinking a little too much too soon. After doing all the workout he did on stage and not having eaten, the best thing is not to start with a B-52! Well, he recovered after drinking a bit of water and the night carried on with us playing some card games and watching some footage of the tournament that Chris had taken. As soon as I get the video clips from Chris, I'll post them below. I'm also waiting for a few photos taken from Friday's...
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I took WAY too many pictures to put them all onto this one page. So here are the
links for a few more pages of pictures:
Pages: Also, I took a few MPEG files off of Bilang's site: www.bilang.com. These are here only to save him some bandwidth. Full credit to him for putting this together! Enjoy!
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