Taekopix
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.
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/
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/
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
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/
Up to now all my pictures were presented using an external Coppermine website. By using the gallery options of my new website I’m starting to migrate the images from Coppermine to
this website. However since I’ve quite a lot of material on-line I’m going to reduce the number of pictures of tournaments before 2011. Little by little the Coppermine gallery will
be emptied until it finally can be taken offline.
Update … on the 1st of january the coppermine gallery has been deleted
If you were familiar with my previous website you probably have noticed that the site has been changed a lot. My old website was based upon flash technology. This new website uses html / php techniques that can be viewed on most browsers (including mobile devices). Improvements are:
- Blog functionality
- Integrated slideshow options
- Improved browsing through the various tournaments and pictures
- Addition of useful links to other websites
For next year I will have a look at the possibility of integrating a web shop into my website. This will make the ordering of pictures more straightforward. However I won’t sell pictures directly from the web shop because I try and get the maximum out of each picture by editing every purchased image. More important however is the fact that payments can be done by using e.g. PayPal and/or credit card. This ends the (often crazy) banking costs of transferring money between different countries.