My Olympic workflow and schedule here in Paris

If you have been reading the blog for a long time (or maybe just for the last couple of weeks), you know that I am planning, photographing, editing, posting, blogging and doing a whole lot of walking and riding to get from one place to another at these Olympics.

And yes, I still have crazy fast deadlines for Team USA. Unlike the Winter Olympics where USA Hockey wants a handful of key photos in 15 minutes, in these Summer Olympics, USA Water Polo actually prefers more images, with a little more time to deliver. Typically I am delivering the best 45 images to the team within 45 minutes of the game.

Let me tell you how I do that and how I manage my day.

Actually, let me start with the night before. The last thing I do before I go to sleep is check the Paris 2024 Intranet website to see which sports I am going to visit on the following day.

Depending on what sport I am covering and how far it is from my hotel, I typically wake up before 7:30am and grab some breakfast downstairs at the hotel. All press hotels are required to include breakfast for us. And the spread at my hotel is pretty darned good. I love those chocolate croissants, but I am still trying to figure out how long to boil and open my eggs! More about that in another blog post...

It is really hot here, so I typically take another shower in the morning (but god knows why because the minute I am on a train, I am sweating my brains out).

I try to get to the venue early so that I can write a blog post. If not, I get a locker for my gear and go shoot whatever I can in the time I have available. Once I have captured images, I may start the download process on the train and start culling through images, as I head to my next location.

My typical desktop at a media center within a venue

For any USA Water Polo game (which is once a day), I go directly from the pool deck to the media center (one full block away which is irritating) and download ASAP. I am using the fastest ProGrade Digital Iridium CFexpress memory cards and ProGrade Digital USB 4.0 readers and they are screaming fast! Even though I have a 15" MacBook Air which is lighter and smaller (and I prefer for my photo tours), here at the Olympics I am using the newest Apple MacBook Pro M3 Max computer for pure power. With this combination, this entire downloading process happens in about one minute.  I love that! I am typically shooting around 1500-2000 images per game. In order to make my deadline, after downloading, here is what I do:

* I use Photo Mechanic to cull through my images, getting rid of the bad ones and duplicates. I also mark my favorites so I know which ones to retouch. By the way, almost every Olympic photographer uses this software because it is so fast.

* I then rename the remaining images (also using Photo Mechanic) with something like "USAWP-Women-vs-Spain001, 002 and so on.

* I then filter all images that I color coded (as favorites).

* I then hit "E" to edit those images in Adobe Photoshop. As Olympic photographers, we are not allowed to make many modifications to our photos. Just cropping, tweaking the exposure and white balance, and that is about it.

* Once I have retouched all the images, I then use Photo Mechanic to save those images to a sub-folder resized to 2000 pixels (which is a more manageable size for the team).

* I then drag all those images to the team's content management web site to deliver.

Again, all of this process is done in less than 45 minutes. Sometimes even less than 20 minutes.

In between the shooting and the retouching, I am usually either working on images, writing a blog or moving from one place to another (and sometimes, like now, I am blogging while on a train. Sometimes I stop to grab a quick lunch and sometimes I just slam some energy bars. Of course, I have to have my coke zero as that addiction runs deep. :)

😀At the end of the day, I usually get back to my hotel around midnight and write another blog. At the same time I make sure to back up all my images to the new 4TB Crucial X10 external SSDs if I have not alredy done that during the day. I have 4 of those with me and keep multiple copies on the numerous drives. Just like the memory cards, readers and computer, these things are the fastest and best on the market. It is all about efficiency for me here!

Each night, I am also adding my favorite images to my Zenfolio web site. The last thing I do before taking my much needed shower, is recharging all of my camera batteries, my phone, my Apple Watch and my AirPods for the next day.

This has been the ongoing process for the last 2 weeks and will continue for another week and a half. Am I tired? Yep! But I am doing what I love to do, and I know that I am lucky to be here at the Olympics once again. Last night I was photographing at the women's individual gymnastics, and as tired as I was, and as much as my back was hurting, I also soaked it all in. Most of the world is watching Simone Biles and the others on their TV, and I am standing 3 feet from her and seeing her perform right in front of me. 

I gotta run now, I am heading off to the next venue!

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* Thank you to Canon, Apple, ProGrade Digital, Crucial, Tiffen, DataColor, ThinkTank, Adobe, and CameraBits  for providing loaner product to me for the Olympic Games!

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