Photos of  Your Unique Talent

Studio Photography

A Collaboration with Mas Kikuchi Karateka

 

Every person is unique but karateka Mas Kikuchi’s incredible skills and high expectations in the execution of his art made for a particularly dynamic and graceful studio session followed by a close review of each photo we produced that quiet Sunday afternoon at my studio CameraWork45 in Felton Northumberland. 

The photos were taken as Mas executed a series of katas moving across the set.  At times his movements were so fast that the backdrop shook with the air displacement! The lighting set-up  I had designed worked perfectly to sculpt his figure. Balancing the exposure to retain detail in the highlights of his katagi and the shadows whilst shooting at fairly high speed was fine-tuned in post-production.  The set-up also allowed to create more or less space around Mas in post-production.

In all Mas and I agreed on 178 photos.  We narrowed this down to a smaller selection that received even more refined editing.  I plan also to explore how some of these would present in monochrome, as in the example below.

 

Mas Kikuchi is a UK-based Japan-born karateka with 38 years of practice across Japan, the USA, and the UK.  He is the founder of Jokukai karate. To find out more about the classes he runs, please contact him via his Facebook page   Joku-Kai Karate