Sunday, August 10, 2008

Beijing Olympics: Days 1-2

One well respected photographer once said that as far as the amount of work is concerned, it is like covering two Super Bowls per day for 16 straight days. He wasn't kidding. After getting to bed at about 4am following the opening ceremonies, I was back at it around 10am to cover my first Olympic event: women's handball. Pretty random, right?

I have never shot, let alone seen handball in my life, but it was relatively easy to pick up. I still have no idea what the rules are, but it's basically another one of those "soccer-style" games where there are goals on each end and the object is to get the ball in it. Basically what I gathered from the games is that you cannot simply run with the ball, you have to dribble it like in basketball. Also, you cannot obstruct people as they try to pass or shoot, or you may get called for a "suspension" and your team is short-handed for two minutes like in hockey. In any case, the sport makes for some pretty neat action photos.




Although I started off my Olympics with handball, I have spent pretty much the rest of my working time in the National Aquatics Center. Kind of like tennis, swimming can become an extremely repetitive sport to shoot, and in order to keep things fresh, you need to move around and shoot it differently throughout the day. Unfortunately, this is the Olympics... and access is extremely limited. All the best spots (called "pool" positions here, even though pictures are not shared) are given to the big agencies. On top of that, there are who knows how many photographers covering each event so you can't really move around to new positions, because if you did, there'd probably be some German or Chinese guy sitting in your former seat when you came back. So the trick for me has been to try to frame two athletes in an image or to use Olympic signage (this will be an extremely common theme).




Luckily, day two of swimming saw some finals, so at least there would be pretty good celebration photos and also shots of people receiving their medals on the podium and getting all emotional as they stand on the medal stand. Well, at least I thought it would be. The emotion was pretty good, but the backgrounds are pretty busy... but still good moments. The medals ceremonies are set up pretty nicely for swimming, but the problem is that you cannot go up close to the podium to shoot the ceremony because those spots are reserved for "pool" and also for TV. But again, still some nice moments....




As a consolation prize, the athletes are escorted around the venue and are asked to stop periodically by officials to pose for us with their medals. So a shot of America's golden boy, Michael Phelps....



After that morning session of swimming, I was able to grab a quick lunch before heading back to the NAC for some synchronized diving. The photographer set up was not all that great, as the backgrounds were kind of busy and you couldn't really shoot it in such a way to show the Olympic rings, so my solution was to just climb up as high as I was allowed into the stands and shoot down towards the diving pool to clean up the image.




I capped off day 2 with some more swimming, but I'll hold off showing some images, because quite frankly, it's just more of the same. Tomorrow, it's on to water polo and I think some field hockey or tennis!

1 Comments:

Blogger Tommy said...

awesome work jerry. they are always showing the photog pits on nbc, so i always freeze the tv and watch for you. have yet to find you though...haha.

hope you're having a great time!!

4:28 PM  

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