Today, before photographing the Opening Ceremonies, I went and shot figure skating team short program and pairs

I just got back from Opening Ceremonies and while I am downloading the images from that, I thought I would try and get caught up on a couple of blog posts. (OK, probably only one tonight since it is midnight), but I will get the other one up tomorrow. And of course, I still need to go through tonight's images as those should be really cool. But I will let all of you at home see it on your TV before I spoil it for anyone.

This blog shows some of my favorite photos from the team short program. And there is a theme to almost all of them.

I was shooting from what they call the "B position at the skating venue. That position is not down on the ice, but up about 15 rows. This let's me look down on the skaters a little bit but does let me capture the Olympic logo below them. If I am shooting from the ice level, this is not possible.

And hence the theme of the day. It is all about the backgrounds! I got numerous photos that I liked of the skaters, with them surrounded only by white ice (there is one in this blog post), but when looking at the photo, you do not know that they are skating at the Olympics.

With this in mind, I mostly hit the shutter of the camera when the skaters were in front of a logo or on top of one. In this case, I liked the reflection of the Olympic Rings on the ice and waited for the skater to do something in that area.

And here it is again...

Or sometimes they will reach up into the logo.

I was sitting across from the "Kiss and Cry" area where the skaters go to received their scores. I saw this reaction from the Italian skater and had to get the shot. But of course, I framed the image to get the PyeongChang 2018 logo in the shot.

Sometimes the skaters even jump over the logo, and I am good with that. This is the athlete from Israel who may have a rare chance to bring home a Winter Olympic medal for this country.

As you can see, his coaches and teammates were pretty happy with his performance.

Nathan Chen is one of America's hopefuls for figure skating this year, but I think nerves got the better of this 18 year old on this first day of the Games.

He fell during his performance and ended up in a disappointing 4th place to date.

But as all these athletes do, they get right back up and keep going.

This was one of the rare frames that I took zoomed out to 100mm. I decided to do something different and include the logo on the wall and on the ice.

I have a very cool side story for you all. Tonight, as I was on the bus ride back from the Opening Ceremonies, I was looking at my phone and saw a message that intrigued me. It was a message from Cindy and Robby Steinhardt, who read the blog, asking if I could pass on a message to Nathan Chen. Nathan Chen did his performance this morning to the song "Dust in the Wind", which is also one of my favorite songs. It turns out that Robby Steinhardt is the original violinist and vocalist for the band Kansas (who wrote and performed the song). How cool is that?

Oh, on all these photos, I was using the Canon 1D X MK II with the Canon 100-400mm lens handheld. My typical settings were ISO at 1600, aperture at f/5 and shutter speed at 1/1600 sec.

The other thing that I tried on the last skater, was to shoot at a very slow shutter speed. This proved to be pretty interesting, and in the next blog post (showing the pairs competition), you will see many of my slow shutter motion pan shots. And I am really excited about those (because they are hard to shoot and look really cool). But more on that on the next blog post.

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