I spent yesterday evening down at the Chesapeake Fencing Club taking photos for Dan and Ray. They are training to set the world record for continuous fencing and I'm working on some promotional material for it.
The main concept is something along the lines of a vintage boxing poster.So I hauled out the Argus 75 and the Duaflex and did some digital
"Through the Viewfinder" shots (and some straight up digital stuff
too). The light is terrible but I got some interesting results.
I had about 250 raw shots to work from after I threw out the obviously
blurry stuff. So I've been messing with them all day. I'm trying three
basic directions with them. First, I did some saturated "painterly" versions. Dan's
blue lame looked great against the gold walls at the club (I did the
wall treatment too with the help of my daughter Clare. They used to be filthy white with black mold
accents. The fencing club is in a basement after all.) Then I tried some faux
vintage1930's looking sepia photos
and finally some less distressed but
still slightly sepia ones for a fifties look. I've been shamelessly raiding Kathleen's Flickr stream for vintage photos to use for the edges and textures.
By this afternoon I was stir crazy from looking at them (In person Thursday and on my computer today) So I posted what I had finished so far to a
Flickr set. I'm pleased with the results so far but I had to do something fun to maintain what little sanity I still possess. So I was looking at one of the pictures whre Ray and Dan had decided to clinch their off hands (the ones not holding a weapon) into a fist. Historically you'd have a dagger or soemthing in it or at least use it to parry incoming blows but in the modern sport of fencing it is illegal to use it and you have to keep it out of the way. It cannot cover target and target is the whole torso in foil. Clenching the fist seemed a bit more combative than the usual relaxed limp wrist. But it got me thinking about what I could put in those hands (only after abandoning or at least temporarily shelving plans for grafting animal heads onto our two fencers. I started looking at monkey pictures first. Monkeys seemed like a great unconventional off hand parrying device but I did not want to stir up any
C.L.I.T. (Coalition for Liberation of Itinerate Tree-dwellers) supporters. Then I thought of gnomes! Eureka! The sport of Gnomeschwertfechten was rediscovered.
"Gnomeschwertfechten was popular amongst German and Austrian fraternities for a brief time during the late 1920's. It was an offshoot of the Mensur duels that students engaged in in order to earn a dueling scar, usually on the left cheek. Gnomeshcwertfechten was popular because the gnome, held in the off hand, left a small; complimentary scar on the right cheek called a gnomerenommierschmiss."
