The weekend before last weekend the Winter Messer Seminar was held in Utrecht. Bas Doeksen who organized it with his volunteers asked me to come and do some photography. As I hadn’t seen him in quite a while and because I was interested in this particular medieval weapon I agreed!
It was an awesome weekend, and besides the photography itself, I was able to attend some of the workshops myself as well as handle sharp weapons to do some test cutting.
Summary in Pictures
Here is a small selection of pictures to give a rough presentation of the various activities during the seminar.
These included:
– Workshops
– Sparring
– Test cutting
– A Fechtschule tournament
– Good conversations about Medieval European Martial Arts
In terms of photography, this event was actually quite challenging to do. The entire seminar was held inside a sports hall with not too bright lights. Furthermore, the light that came through the windows was mostly diffuse and on the blueish side due to the cloudy weather.
However, even though the pictures, I think, are somewhat on the soft side for focus, they turned out quite OK. And I think they serve their intended purpose well. It was enjoyable to do the photography for this event as it’s different from kendo too.
Some moving images
As medieval martial arts usually involves the reproduction of techniques found in medieval manuscripts, lots of experimentation is done to understand the application or verify the effectiveness of those techniques. This obviously results in lots of interesting moments which lend themselves well for video too.
As I did bring a camera with a high shutter frequency I was able to capture long sequences of pictures which I could then convert into moving images displaying the execution of these techniques.
Below are a few of such captures.
Leave a Reply