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.
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.
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/
Today the dutch open 2012 website is officially released and it is powered by Taekopix!
For 2012 I have developed (configuration, design and photography) the new website for the Taekwondo Bond Nederland regarding the Dutch Open 2012 in march!
Have a look at www.tkddutchopen.com
As ever … if you like to have pictures of your matches just let me know!
See you at the Dutch Open!
Pascal
