Karate Smarties

I've been promising myself that I'd write a post about karate, so I've decided to hang it round the image above. I am the model for the foreground figure, by the way. It's a heavily processed photograph that I took with my father acting as photographer's assistant. The background was generated from vectors and images of a Shotokan tiger and some Japanese characters that I had lying around. Compositing was performed in GIMP.

And, to be clear, the whole thing was conceived as a joke - Che Guevara meets Bruce Lee.

I joined Speke SKC on the 12th July 1984. This club was run by Jimmy Poynton - Bob's younger brother - and met at the community centre behind the Austin Rawlinson swimming baths. From there I went to Poynton SKC when I started work in Stockport. I'm afraid to say that I can only remember the instructor's first name as being Tim. This was a satellite of the Manchester University club run by Gary Harford.

In 1992 I moved to Stoke-on-Trent and – after a short and best forgotten stint at Staffordshire Uni with Ray Garside - started training at the Newcastle Under Lyme club with Steve Hulson. Whilst I was there, I passed Shodan, which was awarded to me in March 1996 by Sensei Keinosuke Enoeda.

In 1997, I moved to the South West and joined Glastonbury SKC, where I still train. (Despite being one of the longest serving club members you won't find me mentioned on their website for reasons of intra-club politics and my own refusal to engage.)

All of the clubs mentioned above were affiliated to the KUGB. In 2003 Sensei Enoeda, who had led the organisation since 1967, died and the KUGB split. The Glastonbury club went with JKA England, under Sensei Enoida’s assistant Sensei Yoshinobu Ohta.

Unfortunately for me, all of these changes coincided with my attempt to pass Nidan. I can't say that this is the only – or even the main - reason why I struggled to pass. But suffice to say that I finally scraped through in March 2008 after several unsuccessful attempts and a couple of years of sulking during which I refused to attempt the test at all.

Even allowing for this, I was sorry to leave the KUGB. As an organisation which numbered world champions amongst its members, it was remarkably tolerant of those of us who just wanted to potter away at club level. Generally speaking, you could ignore the wider organisation and they would respond by treating you with benign neglect.

Not so JKA England. As a much smaller organisation – at the point of the split around a third of the KUGB’s original membership found themselves in JKA England – money is much more of an issue. This means that members get chivvied into attending courses, taking grades and so on, when some of them would rather be left alone.

This is especially true when you consider that the teaching at some courses – national and international – can be perfunctory or even whimsical. I once spent half an hour watching a senior Japanese instructor organise a class into rows to his own satisfaction, whilst the students all got cold and bored. I don't remember much of the rest of the session, but I have the distinct impression that I didn't learn much.

And there is no room for any martial arts organisation to be complacent. With so many different martial arts to choose from these days, there is strong competition for students. Off the top of my head, I can think of karate, taekwondo, kickboxing, kung fu, judo, jujitsu, and aikido all available in the local area. And that doesn't count the different styles of each art and the various organisations within each style. For instance, there are at least four organisations that I know of representing the Shotokan style of karate in the South West.

I find it very hard to explain to those outside the martial arts community why this is the case – although the underlying causes are those old culprits, money and ego - and how it is that my grade isn't recognised by any of these organisations other than the JKA. Strangely, we don't advertise this balkanisation to new students.

I think that Shotokan – and, by extension, traditional karate in general - is a tough sell these days anyway. Its not hardcore enough for the MMA and full contact nutters but too challenging for the gentrified/hippyish, tai chi types. That doesn't mean to say that it has nothing to offer, I just don't know who it offers it to.

Consequently, I find it hard to feel positive about JKA England, the future of Shotokan or my place in it.

So, If you're considering taking up karate, I would have to say “Don't bother!” If you want to learn to defend yourself, take a self defence class - you'll find it much more directly applicable anyway. If you want to get fit, go to the gym - karate is too anaerobic to burn fat. And I'm sure that there are many other approaches to personal improvement that don't involve pratting about in your pajamas.

Here endeth the rant.

PS: Rob Redmond has a website which offers an alternative perspective to all the hagiographic material on some of the other sites that I've linked to in this post. For example, at the time of the KUGB schism he wrote some very solid analysis of events which is worth reading if you're curious. BUT I would advise against reading any of his posts on other subjects – especially politics – as they're risible in the extreme.

Happy Holidays

I've been on holiday with the family, hence the recent lack of posts.

Whilst we were away, we spent a happy afternoon at the National Wildflower Centre. And I bet you can't guess - unless you've just followed that link, of course - where it is.

No, its not the most obvious place, is it?

Anyway, the place is rather overgrown and unkempt and I still can't decide if that's because of a deliberate decision to cultivate windblown flora, or if they've just let the place go a bit in the current economic slowdown.

This post represents a couple of firsts. For one thing, the image above was captured with my Alpha 77. All images posted previously have been taken with my Alpha 100. Tell me you can spot the difference. Please.

And its also the first of my macro work which I've posted.

Given the constraints, the results aren't bad. I wasn't carrying my tripod - a mean you don't on a family day out, do you? - so I was shooting handheld, and the sunlight was very bright. But I managed to get a few images when the sun went in. I was probably the only person there hoping for a few clouds. Then, I ran out of space on my memory card and I'd made the beginners mistake of leaving my spare in my other camera bag.

Never mind, time for tea and cake in the cafe!

Early One Morning Part II

Cheddar Moor and the Mendips, July 2012

Some of the images that I've posted previously had been hanging around for several years, but this one was made last week.

There have been a series of gorgeous, misty, summer mornings here lately and I promised myself that I'd take my camera with me on my journey to work. However, I made the mistake of waiting until I had enough time on the clock to allow for the required delay. So inevitably, on the appointed morning, instead of the picturesque mist we had a dull, gray fog. Crossing Mark Moor, visibility was low, with the sky invisible. As I passed Wedmore Low Grounds, Nyland Hill was totally obscured and I'd pretty much lost all hope of getting anything worthwhile and had decided that I wasn't going to bother stopping.

However, just after Cocklake the fog started to clear and as I came down onto Cheddar Moor, the Mendips could be seen as a faint horizon line to the north. So I stopped at the end of Canal Drove and made a number of images, of which this is one.

This demonstrates why I'm not cut out to be a landscape photographer. I'm just not dedicated enough to get up early on my days off, so I'm always going somewhere else in a hurry when these images present themselves.

As an aside; In processing the image, I discovered that the sensor on this camera - my old Alpha 100 - really needs cleaning. I had to spend an inordinate amount of time with the clone tool to make the sky and hillside presentable. I must admit that I've had this camera five years or so and I've not cleaned the sensor once in all that time. But then I don't have a large number of lenses so I very rarely change them, I just pick up the camera with appropriate lens already attached.

Blast From The Past

The Mersey, looking downriver from Otterspool,

Christmas Day, 2005

This post brings together a couple of subjects already mentioned in other posts - namely, What I Did On My Christmas Holidays and Liverpool.

In 2005, in a break from our usual routine, we decided to spend Christmas in Liverpool. I should say that this was a couple of years before our son was born. The need to get out of the house hit earlier than usual - Christmas afternoon, to be precise - and we ended up at Otterspool Promenade. Obviously, we'd had to get through dinner first, so it was approaching sunset when we got down there.

When we arrived, the river was completely still - no tide, no wind, nothing. My father, who spent many years working on the Mersey - or more accurately under, as a young man he was a diver - said that he'd never seen it like that.

Fortunately, I had my camera with me. At that time, I was still using my first digital camera, a Fuji bridge model. Its traditional to report that this was a great little camera and that I wish I still had it. But that's not quite true. Yet again, a technology company had modified one of its products to make it less functional than it might have been. 

But no matter. I got a couple of nice images, of which this is one.

In another link to my father, the building that you can see on the skyline is Camell Laird's shipyard, where he also worked for a number of years as a cabinet maker. I can't imagine it being possible to have such a varied working life these days, but maybe that's just me and my blinkered view of the world.

Hey, That's My Home Town...

Liverpool from the Mersey, May 2011

I may have mentioned that I come from Liverpool.

I made the images that became this panorama during a visit to see my father at the end of May 2011. We took a trip on the Mersey ferry (and yes, they do play that song - constantly), had a ride on the Liverpool 360 and did all the touristy things, ostensibly for the benefit of our son.

I like the fact that the Three Graces aren't front and centre as in every other photo of the waterfront. The newer build has more prominence and you can just about make out the Albert Dock on the far right.

I know that panorama creation is getting to be a standard feature of many digital cameras. However, like many technologists, I'm a Luddite at heart (and a bit of a freetard) so I used Hugin to create this. It's based on the Panotools library, which was originated by a bunch of heavyweight German mathematicians, so it must be good.

I have very early memories of traveling on the ferry with my maternal grandfather, who would take me out and about during the summer holidays. I can remember the old wooden landing stage, with the massive tires lashed to the side. This was replaced some years later with a concrete platform, which had an alarming propensity to sink in rough weather.

The concrete stage is still there, but the whole of the Pier Head has been redeveloped and you'd have to be blind to say that its not an improvement. I haven't made it to the new museum or the Open Eye Gallery yet, but I guess I will one day.

Cameraphone Capers

Wells Cathedral, 7th April 2012

Several months ago, I was agonising about buying a compact camera. I tend to find that a DSLR is just too big, noisy and downright intrusive in certain situations, so I was seriously considering the purchase of something more discrete. However, I'm really attached to using a viewfinder, which very few compacts have. And to add to my indecision, I was tempted by the various mirrorless systems that are around at the moment, especially the Olympus Pen.

[Despite the fact that my all DSLRs are Sony, I didn't like the look of the NEX system cameras, which shows you just how much of a fashion victim I can be when it comes to technology. To be fair, if Sony had decided to use the A-mount on its NEX cameras, that might have swung things back in their favour with me. However, I'm sure that there are good, technical reasons for going with E-mount. But I digress.]

Anyway, when I changed jobs recently, I had to return my company mobile phone. So, after many years of pay-and-go making do and a few years without any phone of my own, I went out and bought a contract. Again, I used my heart rather than my head when making a purchasing decision and came back with a Nokia Lumia 800.

The Lumia has a fairly decent 8 mega-pixel camera built in and I've found myself using it quite a lot for happy snaps of my family. Controls are limited and the shutter lag is horrendous, but it does the job and I always have it with me. It has, in fact, filled the need that was driving me to consider a compact camera. I've tried presenting this to my wife as an overall cost saving, but I don't think she's convinced.

Over the Easter holiday, we went to the Bishop's Palace in Wells and I managed to leave my camera bag at home. Wandering about after our son, who was absorbed in the Easter egg hunt, it occurred to me to try my camera phone on other subjects. Whilst he was busy with the dragon's nest in the orchard, I made the image above.

I'm not going to pretend that this is how it came off the phone. I colourised the image and adjusted the brightness of the sky in GIMP. But the phone made a good job of the exposure without any help from me. The finished result isn't the best photo I've ever made, but I find it quite pleasing.

This tends to support the hypothesis that the compact camera market will be eroded by camera phones until, in a few years time, we will be left with a three tier market: camera phones at the low end; mirrorless systems in the mid range; and full frame DSLRs and medium format at the top end.

Actually, my view is that the DSLR is a dead end in design terms which will be obsolete in a few years time, but that's a subject for another post.

Early One Morning

Tuesday Morning

I get up early. No, whatever you're thinking, its earlier than that. God knows what I do with my time, cos I don't get into work all that early. 

There is an upside, however. Twice a year - March and September, say - I get to see the sunrise on my way to work. Flexi-time means that, if you stop and get your camera out, you do so on your own time and haste is never conducive to good photography, but at least you're there and it's always an option.

Earlier this year, I started a new job, which meant a new commute and a whole new set of scenery to take in. My new journey is longer - about 30 miles as opposed to 15 - and more varied - the levels, the Mendips, the Bristol conurbation - than the old.

The image above is my attempt to capture some of that variety in a single shot.