Hello again everyone! I’ll be honest, the days are already starting to run together and I have had a different sport/venue every day. After curling, I got my first look at long track speed skating. I was assigned to cover the men’s 5000k race and not only did I get a few photos I really liked, I also got to witness an Olympic Record set by Sven Kramer from the Netherlands!
I usually get to the venues around 3 hours before the event starts so I can familiarize myself with the different photo positions and come up with the best strategy depending on what I want to achieve. Since I had never photographed long track speed skating before, I spoke to several colleagues about what to expect, etc… As you can see, I pretty much got to pick the position I wanted before the throng of photographers showed up and filled in the rest of the spots. (When it comes to the Olympics, the early bird usually does get the worm as photo positions can be CRUCIAL to getting the right shots.
As you can see below, USA TODAY has the orange LAN cable which I connect to my cameras while I shoot. I can then press the “set” button on my Canon 1DX Mark 2 bodies and the image is immediately sent to an editor back in the Main Press Center. That way the world can see our images in a matter of seconds!
I started out in this position but then the photo manager said that I could shoot from some spots on the ice right below this spot, so I just ran the cable down to the spot and shot from there the rest of the night.
Being that it was a 5000m race, it allowed me time to play around with in camera multiple exposures, show shutter, and panning shots to make some more artistic photographs…
The Netherlands Swen Kramer won his third straight Olympic Gold in this race and set a new Olympic Record in the process. This made him quite happy as you can see…
As I mentioned on my first blog post, there are cool robots everywhere! At the Speed Skating last night, these robots greeted the fans that came in and also acted as information kiosks as well as a photo station! They also spoke and moved around and were simply fascinating to watch! Here are a few photos of them in action…
And here is a video of the friendly robots that share information as we walk to breakfast each day…
Next up was some Women’s Hockey. It had been awhile since I had shot hockey and I have NEVER photographed the game THROUGH the glass before. The Olympics do not cut out holes for photographers to shoot through like the NHL, so sometimes the photos get distorted and are easily more out of focus due to the thick layer of glass. That is definitely a bit frustrating when you think you have a great photo only to find out the glass distorted it a bit.
This being said, I think myself and colleague David Klutho worked well together. Here is a great example of Switzerland forward Sara Benz scoring a goal against Japan from my angle(left) and David’s from across the ice…
And a few others from the night…
We also have a couple remote cameras setup so, here are a couple from above the goal…
You might have seen all the stories on the Korean cheerleaders as they have been quite the hit over here! They cheer nonstop and get the Korean fans into the game despite the scores! In fact, Korea was losing to Sweden 8-0 and they were still singing and dancing!
I’ll post an update in the next few days as I just finished shooting Short Track Speed Skating yesterday and am headed to Luge tonight.