My favorite photos from last weekend karate event

I can't be completely objective in picking my favorites from this event because our three grandsons participated—two of them for the first time. Naturally, I was observing them closely and probably paying more attention to them than to my second grandson, who is already a 'veteran' in these competitions. So, starting with my grandsons, here is the first one:

This is our oldest grandson observing another competitor's reaction. I was surprised by how calm he was throughout the entire event—he didn't seem worried or nervous at all.

Seeing our youngest grandson compete for the first time was indescribable. He performed so well that it was hard to believe it was his first time. He finished in second place in his group and proudly carried his medal everywhere.

 

The middle one, as I already mentioned, is a veteran. His Kata is getting better and better. His expression in this picture reflects how deeply he immerses himself in the role when performing his Kata.

Talking about faces, how can you forget this one?

Have you ever tried taking a group picture with a zoom lens? It's a nightmare! No way to fit all of them in one shot! Then I remembered a photographer who once told me he stitched together group photos using Lightroom’s Merge Panorama feature, so I decided to give that technique a try. The biggest challenge I encountered was that everyone in the group kept moving and looking at different cameras. I was genuinely surprised that I managed to put together the picture below.

Click to appreciate the details.

 The rest of this event pictures can be seen here.

From last weekend

Last weekend was a busy one. I took more than 800 pictures, and on Sunday, I edited them down to 463 high-quality images, which can be downloaded here. Facebook kills any picture published there. If you want any of my original pictures download it using this link. 

This last weekend I photographed a Karate event whose theme was the Terracotta Warriors from China. All the pictures from this event were taken using a Canon R6 Mark I and the EF 70-200mm f/2.8 Lens Mark II. This lens was first released by Canon in 2010, but looking at these pictures, you would never guess they were taken with a 15-year-old lens. If a lens is good, it doesn’t matter how old it is.

Why am I still using an older lens? Price. You can buy this lens for less than half of what you would pay for the latest RF version.

But a good lens alone isn’t enough to create great pictures. I spent more than 12 hours editing all the photos. First, I reviewed them all and selected the ones I wanted to edit. After that, I ran the selected pictures through DXO PureRaw to remove noise. Then I imported the cleaned images into Adobe Lightroom Classic, where the real editing process began.

Adjustments to contrast, white balance, blacks, and whites were made to achieve the final results, which you can enjoy on my Facebook page and Flickr. Pictures straight out of the camera are an unfinished product that require work to reach their full potential.

The main difference between someone simply taking pictures and a photographer is the time the latter spends on post-processing. Keep that in mind.

Here are few more pictures from this event.

Leo's Karate

Leo, our youngest grandson, is following in his brothers’ footsteps and received his second belt yesterday —Yellow. He was eager to showcase his new moves for us. Here’s a short video shot at Kaufmann's Karate.

 Today I'll be covering another event and this Saturday a big competition with our grandson Liam!

From Last Weekend

Last weekend was a long weekend with a lot of activity, I shot more than 1200 pictures starting with a Karate Event last Saturday. Here are some of my favorite pictures from the event. 

 

A funny moment!

You can see the rest of the HD pictures of this event here. There photographs were taken using the EF70-200 L f2.8, my favorite lens for this type of events. 

During Sunday and Monday I resumed my normal activities doing some wildlife photography.

These pictures were taking using the EF100-400 L, with a 1.4x.