Photographs of the Rio Olympic Park at night

Hello everyone and welcome to Friday! For all of you, that means that you are heading into the weekend, and for me, it means that I am heading into the home stretch of the 2016 Summer Olympics. If you have been following the blog from past Olympic Games, you know that I always bring my Gitzo travel tripod with me and take night photos around Olympic Park.

This year is no exception, so without further ado, here are the photos from two nights ago.

This is the main area where people tend to congregate. You are looking at the Olympic Superstore where they sell tons of clothes, pins, stuffed animals, commemorative coins and other goodies. To the left of this (and out of the photo) are all the food stands where you can stand in line to get not very good food for too much money. :)

The weird thing is, there is no food on the park grounds that is different from what we have in the venues. This means that I basically have a handful of choices of food each day. I am looking forward to getting some good Brazilian food for the 3 days I am here after the Games are over. (I could not get a flight out earlier, so...hopefully I can relax and take some scenic photos for a couple of days.)

If you remember, a couple of days ago I posted photos showing how ugly it is behind the scenes here. Well...as you can see from these photos, the park that the public sees is quite nice. I love the clean lines of the venues and the colors in front of them.

This shot was taken from the same location as the previous photo, but this time I chose to include the railing, as opposed to shooting over it. I did that to show you how different a photo can be from the exact same spot.

I then moved down the pathway a little bit to get a different angle, with the flags right in front of me. For all of these photos, I was using my Canon 5D Mark III mounted on my Gitzo travel tripod. Most of the time I am shooting at ISO 100 to give me a nice clean image, and allow me to slow the shutter speed down.

I saw these people hanging out on this raised sitting area, and thought that it told a good story. It was a warm evening and people were just relaxing before or after attending their events.

This is a photo of the velodrome. I could have just shot the building, but that would be boring. So instead, I moved away from the velodrome to a spot right in the middle of the walkway. I set up the tripod, got a shutter speed of 2 seconds and took numerous photos.

I am always amused when I shoot these long exposures, because almost always someone will walk in front of the camera and make a funny face. But, unbeknownst to them, I want people in front of the camera.

Another shot of venues 2 and 3. This is where they have fencing, judo, wrestling and a lot more.

This is a tight shot of the most colorful building on the grounds, and it is the main tennis stadium.

Since there are Olympic Rings to the left of the venue, I shot this wide shot to include them.

And here is another shot of the tennis venue, but even closer up.

At one point, I looked up and saw the moon over the velodrome, so I took this shot. Not the greatest photos, but at least you can see what I saw.

Here is a photo of the swimming venue, with all those food stands (that I mentioned earlier) in the foreground.

I was walking back towards the swimming venue (where my I have a locker with all my stuff) and this large group of Argentinian fans came chanting down the walkway. I quickly popped the tripod down and got this one shot.

You may remember this shot of the Olympic Rings from my first day here, when there was nobody on the premises. Now there is a really long line of people waiting to get their photo taken in front of them. I waited in between a group of people walking away, and another group of people stepping in, to get this clean shot.

Every photo in this blog was taken with the Canon 24-70mm II lens, except for this one. This last shot was taken with the Canon 16-35mm lens. I set up the tripod right near the rings (but not in the way of any people waiting in that long line) and shot this photo of the swim venue through the rings.

I hope you enjoyed our little night stroll through the park together.

I am writing this from the Maria Lenk Swim Center where I just photographed the synchronized swimming team competition. But now I am jamming to get back over to the swimming venue for the finals of women's water polo. I am hoping to photograph a USA Gold Medal ceremony!!!

This will be the only blog of the day, as I will editing images from that game and then heading straight to the team party to shoot some photos and have some fun!!!

Go Team USA!!!

_________________________________________________________________________________

And also, remember that you and your friends can enter your email address at the top right of this blog to get an email any time I write a new blog post or send my monthly newsletter.

_________________________________________________________________________________

If you are interested in purchasing any camera equipment, please click here to go to B&H Photo, as I get a referral from them if you enter this way. It does not change the cost to you in any way, but it helps me keep this blog up and running.

_________________________________________________________________________________