Vancouver was the third Olympic Games I’ve covered, but my first Winter Olympics, so I was excited to be shooting winter sports.
At Reuters we generally cover one venue for the whole Olympics, and I was fortunate to be assigned to figure skating and short-track speed skating with Beijing-based staffer David Gray. David was great to work with, and gave me the freedom to be creative during the heats in my photo position.
I really enjoyed experimenting with different shutter speeds to convey motion during short track. I found that if I followed one skater, panning and zooming the camera lens with a shutter speed of 1/20 second, it would freeze that skater, while blurring the others.
Short track speed skating I quickly learned, is demolition derby on ice. The first time I was covering it, I was propelled against the wall when Korean skaters Lee Ho-Suk and Sung Si-Back crashed into the barrier in front of me during the 1,500m.
Photo by Bob Deutsch/USA Today
The collision gave US skater Apolo Ohno the silver medal, and me a cut lip.
It was a crash course in how to shoot short track: use only one camera with a 70-200mm lens and a 1.4x tele-converter (so the second camera lens doesn’t obscure your peripheral vision and hit you in the face when the skaters crash). I also learned that the barrier is only rooted to the ice with a long cable and has a lot of give, so it’s important to jump fast if the skaters begin to lose control in your direction!