The Opening Ceremony of Paris 2024 was a complete let down!

Let me start this blog post by saying this, I had really high expectations for the Opening Ceremony of the Paris Olympics and from a photographic standpoint, it was a HUGE disappointment. Now I have heard that it was entertaining when watched on television, but my perspective is different than most, since I was there and there for one reason, to get great photos, especially of Team USA. And for a myriad of reasons, that did not happen.

Of course the fact that it rained really sucked, but that can not be controlled. I was not fully prepared for 5 hours of straight rain, and that is my fault. But the rain was only part of the story. But let me address that first and get it out of the way. The rain was constant and started about 5 minutes after the first boat passed by us. And it rained all the way through the procession of boats until about 30 after the rench boat passed by. At that point we were taken as a group to photograph the lighting of the Olympic flame and I was happy that the rain stopped. Amazingly, about 5 minutes before the torch arrived at the balloon location, it started to rain again. I could not believe the horrible timing. OK - that is out of the way. Let me tell you the other issues.

First and foremost, we basically saw nothing other than the procession of boats. There was absolutely no entertainment on other boats, no light shows, no music, nothing but boats. In a typical Opening Ceremony, the entry of the athletes is by far our least favorite thing. It goes on for hours and other than capturing photos of our team, it is a bit monotonous. And that is all we had to photograph last night! It was boat, boat, boat and then nothing. This was incredibly frustrating since we all had invested more than 12 hours (standing mostly) to basically get no good photo opportunities. The entire group of photographers were disappointed by this. We thought that they would have some other boats with entertainers or light shows or something! Nope.

When we got to our photo position, I looked at the nearby buildings and saw no lights anywhere. Knowing that Team USA was second to last (arriving around 9:30pm) I was wondering how much light would be left. As it turned out, there were no lights and I had to shoot my photos at ISO 10,000 which produced grainy images,. and even at that ISO, my shutter speed was slow and produced numerous blurry images.

These were a couple of the "keepers" at ISO 10,000 taken with the Canon R1.

Basically, the entire OC was designed for television, with things happening in many different locations, but not allowing spectators or us media to see much of anything. I was talking to people who purchased tickets near our photo position and they paid about $2000 per seat. If I was them, I would not be happy. As a matter of fact, I was one of 40 photographers who was allowed to enter a secure zone to photograph the lighting of the caldron. But it was a shame that no one else got to see that, only on television. And after waiting an additional 2 hours after the last boat passed, we had 5 minutes of lighting to shoot. 

Enough ranting about the first day. 

At least I got a nice portrait taken there, and today was full of great shooting with men's gymnastics, women's water polo, and more!

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