Take better karate photos and videos

You can improve your filming by understanding the importance of lighting

How often have you taken karate photos at a tournament, grading or just at a dojo, only for them to come out blurred, out of focus, or with the colours messed up - usually with a greenish tinge? It'd frustrating, but it's not the end of the world. You can fix the colour of photos on your computer, and although video is harder, you can fix that too. However, far better to take photos that look right in the first place.

All photography is about light - the quality, amount, colour and direction of it. All indoor venues use artificial lights, and these always, always produce some form of colour caste. Large venues tend to have sodium lights, which cast a very green tinge over everything. Incandescent lights (light bulbs) and strip lighting casts different colour hues. What you need is an easy way to compensate for the caste of artificial lighting, and most camera and video camera manufacturers provide you with one - it's called white balance.

White balance is a feature that analyses a white object, then adjusts the camera's colour calibration so that white is true white, not greenish or orangish or blueish. Even though your camera or camcorder may have an auto white balance feature, ignore that and do it manually. You'll need to fill the viewfinder with a white object, but at a karate tournament that's not usually a problem! Simply get someone with a nice clean gi, and zoom into their back.

Once you've sorted out the white balance, you can think about the two other main problems. Both result in blurred pictures, but their cause is very different.

Most of us have automatic cameras - we simply point and shoot. If we're feeling creative, we might zoom in or even change our angle on the action, but that's about it! The trouble with the automatic settings is that they don't cope with extremes at all well. Taking photos of fast action, indoors, often a long way from the action, counts as extreme conditions. Blurring will occur if the action you're photographing is faster than the camera's shutter speed. The shutter speed is the amount of time that the shutter opens to allow the light that will form the image to fall on the film (or CCD in the case of a digital camera). On a normal camera, shutter speeds can range from ten seconds for night photography, to a 1/1000th of a second for very fast action. Generally, a speed of 1/500 of a second is plenty fast enough - in fact it's quick enough to take the blur out of a rotating helicopter blade! The problem is, the faster your shutter speed, the more light you need, because it has less time to get through the shutter. You'd usually provide this using your camera's flash, but at tournaments, you'll often find that you can't get close enough to the action for your flash to provide any meaningful illumination. In these circumstances, you'll need a flash gun, which provides far more flash power, enabling you to shoot at greater distances. If you don't have a flash gun, you may need to lower the shutter speed, but you shouldn't really go any slower than 1/250 of a second.

The other cause of blurring is that our pictures are out of focus or suffer from camera shake. The camera uses its lenses to provide a crystal clear picture at a certain distance. The more you zoom in, the less depth of field you will have, and consequently, the smaller the area that will be in focus. Also, the more you zoom, the greater the need for a triipod to avoid camera shake from blurring your pictures. Therefore, the closer to the action you can get, the more chance you will have of getting a focussed picture because you won't have to use the zoom as much, if at all.

Most people use their camera's auto-focus feature to set the focus. This is a useful tool, because you just press the shutter button halfway down; the camera focuses, then you fully press the shutter button, and the camera takes the picture. The only trouble is, the auto-focus mechanism doesn't work quickly enough to cope with action that quickly moves back and forwards a lot. The answer is either to get further away from the action, in which case light will be an issue, or to preset the focus. To do that, you can use a feature called "focus lock". On most cameras, once the camera has focussed on a point, as long as you keep the shutter button half-pressed, the focus will remain fixed at that level. You can use that to your advantage by focussing and locking on a fixed point in the middle of the ring, perhaps as the fighters bow in, or the contestants bows to begin his kata. Then, the next time the action is in that part of the ring, you can press the button to take the picture.

If you're not afraid of using your camera's manual settings, that provides an even better solution. So long as you maintain a fixed position, if you manually focus on the middle of the ring, that focus setting will work for all further photos at or about that distance from you. If you're quick on the dial, you can even make quick adjustments to compensate for the fighter's movement. This is where a tripod helps, allowing you to concentrate on the action, not how you hold the camera.