view album Shadowing the martial artists
They say that “attack is best form of defense”. However, when being attacked yourself, any blow that is blocked and countered with full force may merely succeed in turning your opponent into a twitching, frenzied berserker.
A slightly more subtle approach is the art of absorbing the energy of a assault. Attacking moves can be intercepted and quickly turned against the attacker, who will find himself suffering enormous amounts of pain while the attacked merely lifts a finger to hold the attacker down by a couple pressure points.
To demonstrate what this looks and feels like a french backpacker introduced me to a whole world of pain a couple of years ago. I was strolling around an asian bird-park when I got talking to this pleasant soft-spoken bloke who had been studying a fascinating form of martial arts. He mentioned its name and took a different bus into town, so as quickly as the pain had subsided I had forgotten the multi-syllabled word.
Visit to a training session in Vienna
It wasn’t until years later that a friend uttered the same syllables again and I remembered the french bloke and his pressure points. The word I had forgotten was “Hap-Ki-Do“, a Korean martial art. He invited me to join in the weekly training session to take photos of his class. It would have helped to get to know some of the moves and arrange a couple of specific shots, but I preferred to be the fly on the wall and weave around the students to take my pictures.
I used the Canon 24-105L IS for most of the shots and the speedlite 550EX to work against the garish neon lights in the gym. For the first time I tried a little-known feature of this external flash – the “Multi” setting for a stroboscopic effect. Not all of the strobe photos worked, but 2 of them good enough for the gallery.
See all images of the Hapkido training session in the album below:
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