Selecting my favourite kendo photos for a photo contest turned out to be more difficult than I thought. First of all, I realized that I did not have that many photos of kendo. This is largely because practicing this Japanese martial art (any martial art, for that matter) and photographing it are mutually exclusive. Still, I have a few shots from tournaments, taken after I had been quickly eliminated from competition.
Keeping in mind that the goal of the contest is to produce a calendar for fundraising, I was looking for high-impact shots, not necessarily those that would be interesting from the standpoint of studying kendo. Also, I wanted to submit a uniform-looking selection, so I decided to convert all submitted shots to black-and-white (or monochrome, to me more precise). Actually, I found that a present called “Yellowed 2” from Nik’s SilverFX 2 plugin works well for kendo photos (after removing the image border).
Converting to monochrome also serves two other purposes: it reduces appearance of noise and it removes distractions from the background. Kendo matches are usually held in school gymnasia, which are painted in colours that are quite horrible for artistic photography. Also, it is next to impossible to avoid the spectators in the background, who wear clothes of all sorts of colours. Even is they are out of focus because of the shallow depth of field (I used Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM
So my contest submission is done. Would it be nice to win? Sure! After all, the first prize is a ticket to the World Kendo Championship in Tokyo. Wouldn’t it be nice to say: “I was selected to go to the WKC!” Oh, the irony… As I said, kendo photography and kendo practice are mutually exclusive.
