2012 Summer Olympics: Women's 10m Synchronized Diving

Last night, I made a quick trip over to the Aquatics venue to shoot the women's 10m synchronized diving event. I really enjoyed shooting diving when I was in Beijing for the 2008 Summer Olympics and was really looking forward to shooting this event in London. Unfortunately, the photographer positions and the backgrounds were not nearly as good at this Games, which was a bit disappointing. But, I still got some shots to share with you all.

When editing these images on the press bus today, I kept thinking of that old Steve Winwood album, Arc of a Diver.

I shot most of these images with the Canon 400m 2.8 lens, but found that it was a bit much for this event and later switched to my 70-200mm lens with a 1.4x adaptor. This gave me an effective focal length of 300mm and zooming capabilities. I also founds that shooting this event handheld was better than trying to track the divers using a monopod.

The girls from Canada were so excited when they saw that they had clinched a Bronze Medal. Awesome reactions from them.

I was incredibly disappointed with the medal ceremony at the swim venue. In Beijing, it was beautiful with clean backgrounds and great viewing for the audience. As you can see from this image, it was cluttered with the media and hard for anyone to view. Yuck!

And then the medalists are escorted over to the press area for their photos. I avoided that but shot this image of all of them clamoring to get their shots. Crazy huh?