photography Archives -

08 Aug

PAWMA Camp: Shihan Fukuda

PAWMA board president Rosanne Boudreau greets Shihan Keiko Fukuda at Friday night’s opening class.

Late this spring, I promised my taller half that I would come with him to Pickathon, a music festival in Oregon. When I realized it was the same weekend as the Pacific Association of Women Martial Artists camp, I told him I didn’t mind not going to camp this year.

Then I found out that Shihan Keiko Fukuda was going to be there for the opening class.

When we talk living legends of women’s martial arts, Fukuda should be at the top of anyone’s list. At 99 she is the last living student of Jiguro Kano, the founder of Judo. She is the highest ranking woman in Judo: 10th dan according to the US Judo Federation, and 9th dan with the Kodokan in Japan, where the men who run things aren’t quite prepared to give a woman the highest honors, no matter how overwhelmingly she deserves them.

Fortunately my husband is a bit more sensible and modern than what I assume is a panel of old Japanese men, and I was able to convince him that this was a once in a lifetime sort of thing, worth skipping a music festival for.

Shihan Fukuda still teaches three times a week, despite being wheelchair bound, and is assisted by her black belts. The piece she chose to share with us was ju-no-kata, the “gentle form.” She demonstrated this form at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. The form does not include actual throws, but rather the lead up to throws – tori takes uke to the point when they are just about to fall, and then sets them down gently again. It was a very slow and deliberate form.

I took a lot of rapid fire sequences of photos during camp and made some into gifs, including this one of Shihan Fukuda’s black belts demonstrating one of the almost-but-not-quite throws of ju-no-kata.

I don’t have any pictures of the camp participants practicing the form, since I was in on the class and there was another photographer taking pictures at that point, but we learned a part that involved joint locks, not throws.

After the class session, we got to watch Mrs. Judo, a brand spanking new documentary on Fukuda and her life. Here’s the trailer.

The rest of camp involved a lot more mat artists than usual, which I really liked. Last year while I was living in Alaska, I trained for several months with the Sitka Judo Club, and got my yellow belt. Here’s another giffed set of pictures from one of the classes taught by Sensei Denise Gonzales.

Stay tuned, because I have several hundred decent photos from camp, and dozens of really great ones, and I’ll share some here in the next week or three. If you were at camp, I will be putting all the good photos up online somewhere else and you will get an email from the organization with a link. If you’re a lapsed member, send in your dues so you can be on the email list to get that link! And if you’re a maybe kinda thinking about it prospective member of the Pacific Association of Women Martial Artists, I strongly encourage you to sign up, because camp is wonderful for three days, and it is also a door into a beautiful community of strong, inspiring, women.

It doesn’t matter if you started training last week – do you catch the white belt in the above gif? That woman has been training for about a month. You have no excuse. Join PAWMA and come play with us next year!

03 Aug

Martial and photographic arts

I have been training in martial arts – specifically, kajukenbo – for nearly five years now, and for the last several years I’ve been taking photos during belt tests at my school, Seven Star Women’s Kung Fu. It has become a big part of my participation in the school, a reason for me not to skip out on anyone’s test, and a great way to develop my action photography eye. This year I was asked to act as an official photographer during the Pacific Association of Women Martial Artists‘ annual training camp. I accepted, of course! I feel it is a huge honor, and I’m very excited.

Camp is this weekend, so today I have been packing, and adding camera gear to the usual pile of athletic gear I take. I’ve also been looking through test photos. We had a black belt test last week, and I still had 2000 unsorted photos from a green belt test which happened just before my husband and I took off for our European bike tour this spring. Since the number of photos I take during camp will probably approach (or exceed!) 10K, it’s time to set aside my novel in progress and get through some of these pictures!

My process for sorting through the hundreds of photos that come out of a test is pretty simple. I take out all the blurry ones, and most photos were you can’t see a face. I also get rid of stupid faces. Occasionally my husband tags along as a second shooter and takes pictures of me, and then I remember exactly why I have this policy. I’m looking at a picture right now wherein my eyes are half closed and my mouth is hanging open. The knot of my belt has worked its way up under my sweatshirt, giving me an unkempt and possibly cancerous look. It’s not a Kodak moment. No one needs to see this photo of me, and no one needs to see the thousands of equally dopey looks I’ve managed to capture. My kwoon-mates have developed a certain trust that my photos will show their best side, and it’s a trust I value. I do occasionally snicker a little to myself, but I mark two thirds of the pictures as “rejected” for fuzziness, facelessness, or dopiness, and then I delete them.

Now I’ve whittled things down to the photos in which everyone looks sharp and badass, or at least competent. Unfortunately, as I’ve become a better photographer, I end up with more and more competent photos, and I’m not going to share 700 photos, so I look through the remainder again. This time I’m looking for the photos that make me go ‘wow!’ The ones where the subject appears to be holding a pose, except they are in the middle of a form. The street fighting shots where you can see that someone is about to lose an eye. The pretty pretty kicks caught in midair, showcasing the flexibility of the hips. The moment after the fist has hit, when the face deforms a little and the pony tail flies up.

This finally brings the number of photos I’m working with under a hundred, and these ones I spend some time developing. I crop out the fluorescent lights, bring the focus of the frame in on the subject, adjust the temperature and colors so they are consistent across the full set of photos. I add tags so that if Jane Smith ever asks me for all the pictures of her doing street fighting, I can find them. I upload a selection to the school’s Facebook page, and a larger set to the photography website my husband maintains.

I started taking photos at the tests nearly three years ago. Now they’re in the school’s brochures, on the website, and even went into another project I did to redesign the logo. The first pictures I took don’t look so great now, considering what I’ve learned since, but it has been a fun journey, and a good counterpart to my training. It gives me an opportunity to look at my kwoon-mates, and our art, from a different angle, through a different lens. I’m looking forward to seeing PAWMA camp through that lens this year.

03 Nov

Let the record state

…that on November 2 and November 3, it was clear and sunny in Sitka. This is after it rained so hard one night earlier this week that the noise of it woke me up at 3 am. And on Tuesday it pretty much rained an inch before lunch. So I am loving this sunbreak, and hoping it lasts.

I took a little time off work this morning and walked down to the harbor near the Forest Service office (just one of five harbors in this island town) and did not slip on the frost covered dock.

This crow was very impressed by my capable surefootedness.

Just kidding. This crow stood still long enough to see that I wasn’t going to toss it anything edible, and then left the scene.

Fishing boats on the dock are much more patient subjects, though.

Mmmm… sun….

Those are pretty much all trollers, with their, umm, troll poles up. Here’s one leaving the harbor, will poles extended.

There are baited lines hanging off those extended poles, which drag behind the boat as it slowly trolls through the water. A troll boat is crewed by one or two people, who immediately bleed and ice the salmon they catch, mostly coho and Chinook (also known as silvers and kings). This is your highest quality fish because it gets personal attention.

I could tell you how much of the commercial catch for the different salmon species is allocated to the troll fleet, because I’m spending my professional time on the ever growing Tongass Salmon Factsheetbook, but I won’t. (Although I will send you a copy of the facts if you want.) Then there’s the Fisheries and Watersheds report to do. And I’m devoting my free time in November to NaNoWriMo. Nothing too literary, really, more of a sci fi pulp sort of novel, but the exciting thing is the hope of finishing a writing project!

The rough storyline is that a photographer is hired by an environmental group to publicize some cute little animals whose habitat is threatened by Big Bad Business of some sort, however it turns out that the environmentalists are actually more interested in the plant that the animals eat because it can be made into an expensive drug, the sale of which is funding their organization and its work. By the end the photographer will probably hook up with a drug enforcement agent, or a conflicted environmentalist…

Anyway, this is all to say that there may not be too much in the way of new Alaska adventures up on the blog for a bit. However, I have a plentiful stash of half-written things from years past on my hard drive, some of which amuse me and I will share with you. Check back on Monday for the first one!

P.S. I went to the pointy top of that mountain before it snowed.

31 Oct

Stormy Weather

I went across the street this weekend to see how the beach was doing with the fall storms. The windy weather has certainly whipped up the waves, and the waves have seriously rearranged the rocks. I will have to go back with voice recorder to capture one of the most striking things about the beach in the storm: as a wave pulls back there is a gurgling, grinding noise of the cobbles of the beach settle back after being pushed up by the water. It doesn’t come out in pictures if you’re not familiar with the beach, but big piles of rocks, up to softball size, have been pushed up toward the high tide line.

I was hoping to find lots of fabulous new treasures on the beach, and I did find one cool thing: a license plate from 1961!

I took a bunch of pictures of the waves, but it’s hard to capture them as photos when what makes them cool is the whole sensory experience – the sound of crashing water (and the rocks!), the feel of the ocean spray and the wind, watching the water rolling in and in and in…

Want to know how waves work? All the particles of the water are moving forward together, pushed by the wind, then as it reaches the beach the lowest layers catch against the bottom. Meanwhile the top layers are still going full bore ahead, and they run out into space without the base of the wave to hold them up. Foom, the wave breaks!

It’s like if you are running and trip–your feet suddenly stop, but the rest of you is still moving. A wave is the ocean falling on its face, over and over.

So here’s a bit of Sitka Sound tripping onto the beach. If you look close, you can see some black spots in the water off the point.

This picture is pretty good because there was a sunbreak.

Here, we can look closer together. I took a zoomed picture. Hint: not seabirds!

Sitting in the swells.

Both Saturday and Sunday there were hardy folks out in wetsuits, appreciating the waves in an up close and personal way. Now you can tell everyone that yes, people do go surfing in Alaska.

Surf’s up!

25 Oct

Halloween Death Heads

I’ve been in Seattle for three weeks – I got married and then left my husband in the Lower 48 for safekeeping. Now I’m back to Sitka for my last month as Tongass Salmon Forest Resident and Southeast Alaska is about the same as I left it – gray and damp, and ten degrees cooler than Western Washington.

It’s almost Halloween, and I saved these photos out of my earlier posts on spawning salmon for their, umm, seasonal appeal.

We’re a little short on pumpkin patches in Southeast Alaska, but the tail end of the salmon season provides plenty of ghoulish remains to get you in the Halloween mood.

Salmon Skellington

Empty eye sockets – the sea gulls make sure of that.

Yep, the skin is just rotting of the flesh here.


Those are some gnarly teeth!

I’m also looking forward to the Stardust Ball, which is how Sitka (at least a certain subset of the adults) celebrates Halloween. It includes a lip-synch and costume contest, and if this video from last year is anything to go on, will be a hoot.

Here’s hoping my planned costume (Carmen Sandiego) will be up to Stardust standards!

29 Sep

Shooting salmon

As you can see, I went back and was more successful in my photographic pursuit of salmon.

It was sunny over the weekend, so I spent quite a bit of time at the beach and in the creek, trying to get as up close and personal with the salmon as possible, without actually touching them.

The live ones would flee from my shadow, desperately thrashing upstream if they sensed my approach. The dead ones were much easier to work with, but that’s a post for another day. Still, after 700 and some photos, I got a handful that I really like.

It’s easiest, of course, to successfully see the fish and focus on it if you can catch it partly out of the water. However, I’m pretty happy with some of the pictures I got with the fish entirely underwater.

Then there are some of the ones with only a selected bit of the fish out of the water, like a tail or a back.

Definitely worth standing in a creek for an hour or two!