Taiji practise at midnight (week 23/08)
Posted in sports on Jun 10th, 2008 Comments Off
As far as technical aspects are involved, this doesn’t rank very high on my list of photographs from Lapland camp, but I still decided to use this photograph from Taiji practise at midnight hour as photo of a week.
Two years ago, I had some heated discussion between myself and one of our teachers on what I can do and can not do with my taiji photographs that have been taken in public park. As a result from this discussion, I decided that I am not going to take any photographs about my own taiji school.
Day after I took this photograph, I decided to accept the line, where I will only take photographs from taiji demonstrations in public parks, which we have once or twice a year, (and midnight practise in Salla) and only publish them on my own web pages (instead of sending to stock photography sites).
From my point of view, this is pretty lousy compromise, because I am giving up some of my legal rights without getting anything back in return. Otherside of the story is that photographying taiji is more like portrait photography than sports photography, since taiji doesn’t have ‘once in a lifetime’ kind of moments and all things can be done with posing.
With these things in mind, commercial photographs about taiji should probably be setup with proper lightning and other studio photography tricks instead of trying to take sneak photographs about normal training sessions. Additional benefit from all the extra work on carrying speedlights, umbrellas etc., is that you are more likely to go through model releases, come to agreement on where photographs can be used, how photo session is compensated to your models and other similar kind of things.
Technical details: Canon EOS 20D & Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro (1/400s, f/3.2, ISO800)
