Pascal

German Open Taekwondo 2013 "on ice"

The most remarkable of the 2013 German Open Taekwondo at Hamburg was without a doubt the winter weather. Who would have expected to have 10 cm of snow on top of his car on the sunday morning of the second day of the event in the middle of march! The president of the WTF Chungwon Choue opened his speach on saturday evening with the openings sentence: “Merry Christmas”.

As usual the event was of high organisational quality. A sportshal with good lighting, 11 fields with court #1 in the center on a raised platform. Still this number number one court is the nicest of all tournaments I have visited so far. It gives the possibility of great shots where the fighter stand out before the darkened public stand! With over 10.000 pictures I returned home. The best of these can be found in my picture e-store.

New functionality @ Taekopix

The last few months I have been working on an option to make it possible to search for images based upon: Tournament, Name and nationality. More options will be added later on. Although the data entry is a lot of work I think it brings some great functionality. Because of the time consuming data entry the tagged tournament pictures will be available much later that the actual “normal” picture gallery in the Event E-Store.

What  is shown in the selection:

- Name of the tournament.
- Name of the picture. When you hover over the name,the picture will be shown in the right upper corner
- Date of the picture
- Name of the red and the blue player.  The name of the winner of the match is highlighted with a red or blue color!
- Number of the match. If the match is a final-match the color of the matchnumber is orange!

Unfortunately there is no link (yet) to the webshop. But when writing down the event and picture number it should be easy to find in the web-shop.

Taekwondo Austrian Open 2012 (Innsbruck)

On the 2nd and 3rd of June the Austrian Open Taekwondo event at the city of Innsbruck was held. Flying or training from Holland to Austria is not really an option because of the travelling costs. So this event has to be reached by car. When driving in “eco-mode” ( although nowadays there are not a lot of “drive at will” stretches on the Autobahn)  the 850 kilometers takes around 8 to 9 hours to drive. After a day taking pictures around the fields driving home is not really a fun thing to do. But hey … I took a lot of good pictures home so can’t complain ;>

The event itself was of high standards with a little less than 1100 contestants. I have seen more head kicks and flying in these two days than most of the other events combined.  Excellent organization with no crazy times and good security. Security was even too good since I was asked at least 3 times if I had accreditation. Since the cords on the press card were finished I had to wear mine in my pocket .. hence it was not visible for the security.

Pictures can be found under:

http://www.pascal-franssen.com/index.php/tkd-austrian-open-2012-sat/

http://www.pascal-franssen.com/index.php/tkd-austrian-open-2012-sun/

21e Kawarmala Jeugd Toernooi (2012-05-12)

Het Kawarmala tournooi in Best was een mooi compact evenement met iets meer dan 200 deelnemers.  Zijnde een jeugd toernooi dit betekend dat de wedstrijden worden uitgevoerd in enorm snelle rondjes.  Ondanks dat voor de wedstrijden “maar” drie velden beschikbaar waren is het een van de meest hectische photoshoots in een lange tijd. Het volgen van bepaalde wedstrijdnummers is een flinke uitdaging!

Voor mij een eerste was het feit dat er geen gebruik werd gemaakt van de gebruikelijke vloertegels die een val wat verzachten maar dat het veld bestond uit een plastic zeil. Aanvankelijk stond ik er wat vreemd tegenover maar in de praktijk leek het geen enkel probleem. Natuurlijk betreft het wel een jeugd toernooi waar hoofdtrappen niet zijn toegestaan en waar over het algemeen geen val van 2 meter moet worden opgevangen.

Nadeel van een jeugd toernooi is dat de deelnemers voor het merendeel klein zijn … ik heb na zaterdag nog enkele dagen behoorlijke spierpijn in mijn bovenbenen gehad ;>

Foto’s van het kawarmala jeugd toernooi zijn te vinden via de volgende link:

http://www.pascal-franssen.com/index.php/tkd-kawarmala-jeugd-2012/

ps: Thx 4 the lunch Roy.

Dutch Open Technical 2012

It has been some while since I last visited a technical teakwondo event. My Last photo shoot was during the Dutch national and Dutch open championship in 2009. During the 2010 edition I was denied access to the tournament because of “commercial pre-arrangements”. That was such a disappointment (an frankly spoken a bit shocking) that since then I did not touch a technical event.

Anyway … time passes on and heals the wounds. For the 2012 it struck me that the term Dutch Open is a fair overstatement considering that most of the contestants are of Dutch nationality! There were only a small number of Belgian people there (I don’t even know why I write this blog in English!!). With 136 people it’s a fairly small group too. It’s a shame because the location (Rotterdam topsport Center) is a big improvement over the location in Nijmegen. I think there is some work to do for the 2013 event!

My initial reason to visit this event was to test out a new piece of equipment. This does not mean however I did not enjoy it. I must say that I rediscovered the technical discipline. When searching for sportraits with “strong” posses technical is an excellent source. Look at the picture attached to this blog-item … I think is a beauty and there are many more like that.

Pictures of the Dutch Open Technical 2012:

http://www.pascal-franssen.com/index.php/tkd-dutch-open-technical-2012/

Belgium Open Taekwondo 2012

The Belgium Open Taekwondo is the last of the big tournaments in march.  The setting in Gent is excellent. The sports hall is spacious and there is lots of daylight coming in. But even without daylight the area is perfectly lighted as my shutter speed did not go down when the day turned into night. The first day had a difficult start. Around 11:00 most fields had only run 9 matches.  With such a big delay the demonstration of the Korean team (even though it was a very impressive one) meant even more delay in the schedule.  Obviously the demonstration took some time but before it could start 4 competition areas had to be “broken down” and rebuild again afterwards. Possibilities of trying to minimize the delay were limited since only 4 area’s were equipped with video replay.  Practically this meant that in the end the 4 competition area’s were “fully loaded” while the other 6 were empty. At the beginning of the evening most the volunteers disappeared … there was little yellow remaining. I went home around 22:15 (the matches continued unil 23:30) arriving home just after midnight.  Uploading the pictures and get ready for day #2

Dutch Open 2012

For the 39th Dutch Open I was more involved than normally since I also designed and implemented the website for the event (tkddutchopen.com).  For the event itself I can only say that it was one of the best arranged and timed Dutch Open’s I’ve visited. Normally passing the 22:00 mark on the saturday was no exception. This year however the final ended on a fairly early time.

Although the organisation was good there was a certain thing missing … I missed a certain “vibe”.  From time to time shooting pictures of a match with almost no sound around … that feels a bit strange.  Regarding the location were the event was held I must say it is starting to feel a bit “old”.  The lighting is harsh and uses a type of lighting that results in an inconsistent color (greenish, yellow-ish and “normal”).

Pictures of the Dutch Open 2012:

Saturday:  http://www.pascal-franssen.com/index.php/taekwondo-dutch-open-2012-saturday/
Sunday:     http://www.pascal-franssen.com/index.php/taekwondo-dutch-open-2012-sunday/ 

German Open 2012

As the opener of “Crazy March” I visited the German Open 2012 which was held on the 3rd and 4th of March 2012. I say “Crazy March” because there are 4 major Taekwondo events held in this month. These are the German Open, Spanish open, Dutch open and to conclude the belgium open. I’m taking pictures at 3 of these 4 events.

As the previous years the tournament was held in Hamburg at the “Sporthalle Hamburg” at the krochmanstrasse. One of my favourite bits of this taekwondo event is the center raised podium. This podium is the best Taekwondo area I have seen so far. Raised center stages should be used a lot more often! It is great for spectators and it enables the use of the Big gun (300mm f2.8) with a clear line of sight from most positions.

Pictures of German Open 2012:
Saturday: http://www.pascal-franssen.com/index.php/tkd-german-open/
Sunday: http://www.pascal-franssen.com/index.php/tkd-german-open-2012-sunday/

ps

One thing I have learnt this year is that driving in the center of Hamburg with old digital navigation maps is not really recommandabel since the one-way-street situation has quite dramatically been altered over the years. It took quite some time to get back to my hotel on saturday evening :>