Olympics Blog Update Number 3 – I’m NO Sailor

I’m not even sure what day it is as I write as it really starts to feel like Groundhog Day about now! The only reason I know is because of the schedule that I receive showing us our assignments. Here is the infamous “whiteboard” located in our USA Today offices in the main press center.

I mentioned our incredible hard working staff and editors who caption and push out thousands of images every day here and so I thought I would post a few of them in action.

I left off my last blog as I headed to field hockey. I have been friends with Team USA players Lauren Crandall and Katie Bam ever since I did portraits of them for the London games, but this was my first time to actually see them play in person! Despite the rainy weather, this was a treat and they both played awesome leading Team USA to a big win over Japan! Hopefully, I’ll get to do another one of their games soon!

Next it was off for a full day of Beach Volleyball. This is a really cool sport complete with concerts, dancers, and colorful people. The staff here is also great making sure that we always have water and are comfortable.(It gets crazy hot during the day!) Another cool thing about this sport is that they play matches at night! Some even start at midnight!! The atmosphere is akin to a rock concert and very exciting! Here are a few of my faves from the day…

So yesterday, I got the assignment of sailing and even though water is not my thing, I thought I’d give it the old college try. They actually put photographers in a boat so that we can follow the action to get photos. Well, the race was delayed for about an hour an a half and so we just went up and down and up and down for the whole time. This was not good for me as I could tell I was starting to get pretty dizzy and a bit seasick. Not to mention, the smell around that bay really is not pleasant.

Once the race started, I definitely felt pretty bad but still tried my hardest to get the photos that we needed. Mad props to the professional sailing photographers as taking photos while being tossed around and moving up and down is WAY hard!!

Here are a couple I liked…

Loved the light on this first one!

Not often you get to sail with Christ the Redeemer in your background!

I then ran home and immediately took a hot shower and will probably burn those clothes I wore. I took a ton of vitamins and went to bed around 8pm.

It’s Saturday now and I feel much better after sleeping off the seasickness. I took a ton more vitamins after breakfast just to make sure that I don’t have any after effects. I am in the middle of shooting men’s basketball all day and just had a wild double overtime game between Argentina and Brazil! It felt more like a soccer match than a basketball game and it was tons of fun to shoot! Here is a behind the scenes iphone pic of my camera connected to our VLAN via the orange cables. As I take a photo, I can just hit button on the back of my camera and the image is sent to my editors in less than a second! Pretty cool stuff!

We also have a remote camera setup for all the men’s games and I happened to get a few good ones! (Well I never saw them but my editor Shanna picked them and they look great to me!) This game was pretty fierce as these countries are huge rivals with Argentina winning in double overtime! Here are a few…