Technicalities

The Camera

I used to have a Minolta DiMage 5i, it was a great camera but finally died on me at the end of January 2004. The main thing I liked about it is the AF/AEL button that allows you to lock in the shutter and focus settings and then take a series of shots without the camera pausing to calculate settings when you press the shutter button. It had a 35-250mm zoom lens. I used a 256 MB memory card and usually took 1536 x 2046 images resulting in image files about 0.5 MB each.

After the Minolta died I bought a Canon EOS Digital Rebel. It's a great camera definitely a step up from the Minolta. I have a Tamron 70-300mm zoom lens as well as a Canon 18-55mm lens. I mostly use the Tamron.

I also occasionally use a Canon PowerShot S200 - the Canon S200 is an excellent small camera limited only by the fact that the optics are tiny and just don't have the light gathering capacity of the bigger cameras. I take the Canon S200 with me pretty much everywhere I go, the Rebel is too big to stick in your pocket. The pictures that actually appear on the site are at a much lower resolution than I take at, typically 640 x 480 pixels resulting in a picture size of about 30-40K bits.

A little while ago the Rebel started having problems with the shutter button. I sent off to the manufacturer to have it fixed which took a remarkably long time. While I was without the Rebel someone asked me to photograph a Yoga class, I rented a Canon 20D. I liked it so much I bought one. Another great camera, definitely a step up from the Rebel, mostly in terms of the speed with which it turns on and calculates the settings for a shot. The autofocus and other settings are extremely fast. I now have two cameras, the Rebel and the 20D.

 

The Pictures

Most of the pictures are taken in the Tenzan Aikido Dojo which is a part of the Seattle Holistic Center.

 
It is a wonderful dojo but in some ways not a great place to take pictures. The light (especially in the winter) is not very good. It is lit at night by two sets of strip neon lights that give a very even light but are not very bright. At night I use an ASA 1600 equivalent sensitivity setting on the camera which gives very good shutter speeds  (typically 1/180) but also means that the images can be very grainy, though the 20D is an 8 megapixel camera and gives very fine shots even a the 1600 setting.  The Dojo has some large windows on the west wall and part of the Southern wall, a couple of skylights and a window high up on the Southern wall, so in the summer and for day-time classes the light is quite good and the picture quality tends to improve along with it. For obvious reasons I never use a flash.

The pictures are never posed. I sit in the visitors area and take photographs as the class goes on. Something I read somewhere compared photography to looking for pebbles on the beach - if you examine enough of them you are bound to find a few good ones. This pretty much sums up my approach. I take a very large number of pictures and discard most of what I take. Typically in an hour class I will take 150-200 shots. Of those I will perhaps keep 30 or 40 with, If I'm lucky, 4 or 5 of them being quite good. I have a home grown program for categorizing the pictures. I keep track of pictures by who is in them, what they are doing, when it was taken and how good I think the picture is.

I got into practicing Aikido as a result of taking children to classes and sitting watching the class. I enjoyed (and still enjoy) watching but eventually felt like I really ought to get out there and try it myself. I can't claim to have ever been a great student of the art - but I feel like I have learnt a lot and certainly, when not exhausted, frustrated or thoroughly ashamed of myself, I enjoy it immensely. My son Thomas was the first in the family to start practicing, he was soon followed by Bryony, Guy and Morwenna and lately my wife Bridget. I don't think all six of us have ever been on the mat at the same time but it is a great common bond in the family nonetheless. Currently Morwenna, Guy, Thomas Bridget and I are actively training - Bryony is off doing other things!
Not surprisingly many of the pictures involve family members but I am quite opportunistic about what I photograph. Also, not surprisingly, it tends to be easier to photograph the senior and more experienced members. I do not try to get pictures of specific techniques. Still images are not a good way to see how a particular throw or sequence of movements actually works. The only way to learn such a thing is to do it.

I think it is possible for a photograph to give a different kind of insight into what is happening. A photograph can say something of how two people relate to each other. The word "Aikido" comes from three characters "Ai", "Ki" and "Do". The Ai character represents harmony and peace. The root Chinese pictogram is said to derive from a mouth and a roof implying one voice in the house. The term carries a sense of integrity and strength. Ki means spirit and Do means way or path. Aikido is often translated as "the way of spiritual harmony". I believe that some sense of this comes through in some of the photographs, at least what I see in the best of the photographs is some hint at one or more of these aspects of Aikido.

Aikido 
Standing Waiting