Dateline Beijing: By now you're probably wondering how all of these pictures I'm taking are being organized and managed. For that matter how the international press makes what they do seem to happen instantly. The world of news photography has always stressed the "information super highway" and at every Olympics the ante gets raised.

In 1984 the first "Video Still" cameras were used and, believe it or not, the Opening Ceremonies were photographed by one American Newsmagazine on 8x10 Polaroid film, scanned in the stands and sent via telephone modem to New York. How things have changed! Today we have constant connectivity and images and stories are transmitted in real time.

Above is Doug Mills from the New York Times working on his laptop wirelessly connected at poolside. So imagine if you will: Doug captures the shot as Michael Phelps touches at the end of the pool to win Gold. After the jubilation, Doug puts his memory card into a reader, transfers the images to his computer, edits, select, crops, color corrects, and captions the images. He then transfers them to his paper via FTP where they are ready for publication. How long did this take? He was ready to shoot the next race a few minutes later.

And that is slow in comparison to what I saw at the Opening Ceremonies. Many of the agencies and papers had Ethernet cables directly connected to the shooting positions. One of the Chinese News Agencies went one better. They had wireless links directly from their cameras in real-time.

Sports Illustrated is "ingesting" and sending all of their images back to New York where they are edited. A far cry from chartering private jets to courier the images back to the office.

What am I doing? First of all, I'm shooting a ton of pictures which translates into GIGA BYTES of data. As of this post I am at 175 gigs of images; the file count is at ~17,000 images! This is Day 6 and I am more that half way past my total in Torino!

In my "office" I have set up two USB2 750 gig hard drives and one 1 TB Raid Drive which is also an FTP server

I am using 2 Fire wire 800 and 2 USB card readers to download my images. Incidentally, I am using 8 gig 300X UMDA Compact Flash Cards in my cameras.

So Richard, what is your post capture workflow? So glad you asked. (This is definitely for the techies.)

First of all, I have set up a very strict set of rules on how things are filed using a standard windows folder tree.

I am using a couple of high-end downloading and browsing software packages as well as PHOTOSHOP and an FTP CLIENT. One of them allows me to move the pictures off the memory cards and add IPTC and or XMP data to the image file.

Once the files have been transferred to their respective folders, I open them in the browser and tag the images I want to do a Quick Pick of.

Then I copy the JPEGS (I am shooting both JPEG and NEF (raw) files simultaneously) to a Quick JPEG folder

Once in the Quick JPEG folder, I open the images in Photoshop and do the cropping and color correction. After that is done I run a batch process that adds sharpening. These gets saved to a file that's called Cropped and Fixed

Now the images are pretty well done, except one important thing, the are HUGE. So next I run a little program that one of my friends and co-workers Andy Cooper wrote that batch processes the images and makes then into smaller JPEGS. These become "Richard's Pictures of the Day".

Then it's off to the selection process for the Blog, and those images are posted on a server here in my office in the MPC and mirrored to a server in both Bldg 83 (Kodak Research) and at another server at my home in Pittsford.

Once all that is done, all of the Pictures - JPEG and NEF - are moved to The Network Attached Storage Server here in the MPC, all of the "Richards Pictures of the Day" are moved to the servers in BLDG 83 and my home, and then once that is complete the NEF files are moved.

Sounds complicated? Well, I couldn't have done it without some support! Thanks to Ken Harvey for making sure all of the IT stuff keeps working, and John Dyer for handing all the images in Rochester. Andy Cooper for his piece of code, Tom Hoehn and Jenny Cisney for publishing the blogs, and Jane Ryan and Bruce Graham for their wordsmithing!

6 days down. 10 to go.

Still shooting on...
Richard
The Photon Wrangler

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Dateline Beijing: Today was a study in contrast. What could have less in common photographically than Women's Gymnastics, Women's Water Polo and Men's Foil? Not much.

Here comes a big admission: this is the third time I have photographed Water Polo since high school and going into the fencing arena, I was doing it cold. But it looked like fun. After about 5 minutes of trying to the capture the action, there are a few conclusions to draw. These guys are fast and have the aerobic capacity of humming birds! Not much of a comparison between Olympic Fencing and the Erol Flynn swashbuckling Hollywood, but really fun to photograph.

After bouncing around today, I will keep the words short and the pictures a plenty.

Gymnastics. The access is the best it's been at any Olympics. Getting a good angle has not been much of a problem.

Going back a few days, what is water polo? But of course it's team handball played in the pool! This is one of those sports where so much of the action really can't be photographed because it's underwater!

But first, what is this Photo Marshall doing with Photographer Bob Long's shoe?

Before entering the pool, we were required to put on nylon shoe "booties". They take the cleanliness of their pool deck here very seriously.

Then it was on to FENCING! I shot it straight and I shot it artistically. To freeze the action, it was 1/1000 of a second at F4 ISO 2000. And to get the artistic "da blur" shot (there goes that term again) it was 1/15 of a second at F11 at ISO 400 (for those of you who do reciprocity calculations, its not exactly right on but it worked.)

Until Tomorrow
Richard
The Photon Wrangler

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Dateline Beijing: It's Tuesday, so it must be Beijing! Sorry for that, but I couldn't resist. One of the things you do as a sports photographer is try and get pictures that convey how an athlete feels. I know that sounds a bit cliché but while capturing the movement of the body, having a good shot of the face really helps. (click on any of the images to see them larger)

Four years ago in Athens was the first and only time I had photographed White Water Sports. This afternoon I shot the Slalom events for Kayak and Canoe. When I returned to the Main Press Center and began to edit the images, it hit me again that it was the faces of the athletes that really told the stories. This is a grueling sport. After the first run, one of the younger photographers who is new to this sport (not that I am exactly a veteran) asked the question - now that the prelims are over how do they run the finals? I told him they paddled the opposite direction...... up stream! He moved to a new position. So either he believed me or he wanted to get away from this crazy person.





So for the shooting facts: I moved around the course a bit to get a nice angle as the boats either got dunked, or shot out of the water. I was trying a new combination of lenses using a 200-400mm zoom with a 1.4x teleconverter. The exposure varied depending on the angle and near the end of the event... for the first time since the games began we had sun and blue sky!

So look at the faces. There's the real story.

From Beijing, Paddling along
Richard
The Photon Wrangler

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Dateline Beijing: By now you probably know the USA defeated China in what was one of the most anticipated events of the Olympics... (so far- after all this is only day 3!) ...Men's Basketball. It was so popular that many of the photogs, myself included, went to the game 4 hours in advance to get a good shooting position. Fortunately, I was able to get a spot in my "traditional position" along the baseline to the right of the key, even with the 3 point line, next to the bench.

It was Yao Ming vs Kobe, the Chinese National team against Dream Team II, in an area that was clearly was a home court, but all the while respectful of the visiting team. Looking around the stands at all of the Chinese Flags with US Flags mixed in was a far cry from a UCLA at USC event! Oddly there were people waving the Chinese Flag while wearing a Yao Ming basketball jersey from the Houston Rockets! Or a fan with her cell phone in one hand and a bottle of coke in the other, just like back home.

For last night's shooting I used a 70-200mm zoom for the under the basket shots, and for down court a 300mm F2.8. This was the first time I have used a zoom lens for basketball. When I was doing this full time the "modern" mid range had not been perfected and it was fixed focal length on dedicated bodies. Shooting this way opened up some new picture possibilities. Once again the lighting was pretty close to perfect with an exposure of 1/1000 second at F2.8 with an ISO of 1600.

So who is and what is this guy in front of me doing? Read on...

I bussed over to the game with David Burnett who takes a totally different approach to the Olympics. While many of us are out there banging away at 9 frames a second he takes a more gentile approach. Pictured here is Dave with his 4x5 Speed Graphic. Knowing something about his background, including at a very young age covering the war in Vietnam, I can only describe him as a Renaissance Man. And it doesn't hurt that he seems to make the picture every time!

Here as promised yesterday, some pictures from the USA China Men's Basketball Game.

Cheers from Beijing
Richard
The Photon Wrangler

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Dateline Beijing: It's going to be a late night since the USA/CHINA Mens Basketball game does not tip off until after 20:00 hours - that's 10pm if you are not from the rest of the world! So I am writing a bit early and will bring you the pictures of that game tomorrow. Plus I need some time just to catch up with archiving all of these files. I have already taken close to 4000 pictures!

Today, it was back to the National Aquatics Center or the "Water Cube", and some swimming finals. After spending a few hours yesterday getting reacquainted with water, I was ready.

For you photo techies out there the exposure is quite good. All of the venues are lit for HD television production. With my 600mm lens I was shooting at 1000/sec at f 4.8 (my 600 is actually a 400mm F2.8 with a 1.7x tele extender) at ISO 2500 (yes 2500!)

As usual, it was hurry up and wait. Many of us got there 2+ hours before the first event to get a good position, and with kudos to the BOCOG the positions are quite good. I was shooting about ¾ the way down the pool on the deck.

One added "photo op" was the presence of President Bush and family. With our lenses trained on him we couldn't believe it when he entered and tripped on the stairs. Oops.

As you probably have read by now, Michael Phelps won his first gold medal. He is really hard to photograph. A good friend of mine always referred to swimmers at this level as "human fish" and given how low Michael keeps in the water it's possible he might have developed gills!

In sports there must be a winner and a loser and with that brings out all sorts of emotion. "The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat" Here are some pictures of how the athletes and fans reacted.

Enjoy the pictures - more to come!

From Beijing
Richard
The Photon Wrangler

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Dateline Beijing: Day One is now in the record books, after a very restful but all too short night it was on to what the Olympics is all about, the competition. Well, actually for me, photographing it.

Today it was looking at the schedule and seeing what might be interesting, and also testing out the venue transportation system. So I went to Team Handball! So what is Team Handball? I am so glad you asked. It is Water Polo without the water.

Then it was off to the preliminaries of Swimming. And given that there were lots of preliminaries in addition to getting "warmed up" I also started to play around with some slow shutter speed - "da blur" pictures are what my colleagues so aptly call it. Ah it brings out the artiste in me.

So second question of the day. Is it better to be good or lucky? This evening was one of those nights when by chance I was able to catch one of those magical moments. This afternoon I ran into Bob Long who is covering the games for the US Olympic Committee. In addition to being one of my good friends, his father George gave me a start in the business. Well, Bob mentioned that he was going to Fencing because the US team had a shot at a Gold metal. While walking back from Swimming I went into the Fencing hall just as the awards ceremonies were beginning. It made for a few nice pictures of the Americans who swept the medals.



As they left the podium most of the photographers followed the champion. And there just in front of me happened to be one of those Kodak Moments you rarely get. Olympic Silver Medalist Sada Jacobson in an intimate moment.

Yes, sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.

Enjoy the pictures

Richard
The Photon Wrangler

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