My first images of sports here in Tokyo!

Today was my first day of shooting some sports at the Tokyo Summer Olympics. But even before doing that, I was out last night to capture some fun images of Japan at night.

I took the camera out last night after sunset to have some fun. I was just outside my hotel (since I have a 15 minute time limit due to quarantine), so I decided to try some motion pans as the cars went by in front of me. I saw this taxi coming by with the Olympic logo and fired off some shots. I had the camera set to ISO 800 at f/4 which gave me 1/20th of a second for my shutter speed. I moved the camera and Canon RF24-105mm lens at the exact same speed as the oncoming taxi and got this photo. 

Then I packed up my gear to take to the Olympic Park today, to test during a practice session for the women of USA Water Polo.

Because the athletes were all around the perimeter of the pool, I had to shoot from up in the stands. The South African team was practicing in the pool as well (closer to where I was sitting) so I fired off some shots of their athletes too. I was using the Canon camera with the Canon 200-400mm lens. I love the way that the camera tracked this athlete's eyes even with all the water splashing in front of her.

I was there not only to test the new camera, but for me to warm up. Just like the athletes, we have to hone our skills too. For the shot above and below, I tried the Canon R5 with the new Canon 100-500mm lens. I wanted to see how that combination worked inside this venue. 

As you can see, it did quite well.

Then I was back to playing with some different settings to see what worked best for this sport. You can tell from this photo that the ladies were having a good time in the pool.

This is the coach of the US Women's team, Adam Krikorian. He has lead the women to two consecutive Gold medals, and hoping to make it a three-peat here in Tokyo.

This is one of my favorite shots of the practice, utilizing the super fast burst rate of the new camera to capture Ashleigh Johnson in the peak of action.

It felt good to be back at the Olympics, determining the best settings for the upcoming games and to start capturing images for the team.

I was putting away both cameras when I heard a commotion below. It was all the ladies singing happy birthday to Adam, their coach. I quickly grabbed the Canon R5 with the Canon 100-500mm lens and fired off some photos of them as they passed Adam through their birthday tunnel.

As I mentioned earlier, these ladies are a tight knit group, who genuinely like each other. That just comes through in the images.

Oh...and one more thing that happened early this morning...I decided to get rid of my beard. Wearing a face mask for 14 hours a day, it was just too irritating. So bye bye to the whiskers!

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