Photographing Judo: Getting the detail in the Gi

As you will be aware from the previous post, I recently photographed some Judo. It's one of the hardest things I've tried to shoot to date - extremely erratic, fast moving subjects, bad lighting and lots of white. As a result, most of the images came out rather flat; this post outlines a few things I did to coax some life back into my shots, which hopefully you'll find useful next time you find yourself photographing martial arts.

Judo

I recently shot a Judo competition. There's a short post on some useful post-production I did in the works, but for now if you'd like to see the images they're here. Enjoy! Benji.

HDR

HDR seems to be a contentious topic; some people really like it, others hate it with a passion. For those who hate it, their reasoning usually comes down to the existence of a seemingly endless amount of really horribly edited photos whose only upside is that they look extremely wacky (see below). However, done well, HDR can be an very useful tool.