Tuesday, July 27, 2021

A VERY quick visit to the diving competition

Yesterday, after photographing the water polo game, I made some bus trips to the main press center and then back to the diving venue. But the buses have not been on schedule here (that coming in another BTS blog) and I literally caught the last 20 minutes of the synchronized diving competition. I had to run into the venue and I was sweating up a storm. I had to take a minute to calm my breathing before shooting.


The only open shooting position I could find were up high, but I had no time to investigate any other options.


I liked the Tokyo 2020 sign in the background and decided to frame the images to use that to my advantage.


The Americans did amazingly well and actually took the Silver Medal for the first time ever!



And their teammates were there to cheer them on.



The venue was pretty dark so I was at ISO 4000 to get a shutter speed of 1/1000 of a second. 


I know that these divers do not look synchronized in these photos. But I have seen this many times before (London and Rio) where the angle where I shoot distorts the synchronization.



Even though I had a very short amount of time to shoot the event, I still had to try some motion panning. I like this photo because it is different and shows the spin of the divers. For those of you who want to know, I was shooting at 1/60th of a second on a monopod. I prefer to shoot these handheld and from a standing position, but the Canon 200-400mm lens is a bit heavy to handhold, and we were required to shoot from a seat. You would think with a stadium of empty seats that we would have more room for photographers, but weirdly that is not the case. 


After shooting a lot of tighter shots, I pulled back and shot some wide photos.


And then it was time for the medal ceremony (which is totally obscured by television cameras)


Luckily they have the women walk by each photo position on the pool deck (3 of them) so that we can get photos of them. Here is the American team with their Silver Medals - Go Team USA!


The Chinese (who dominate this sport) took the Gold Medal.


The Mexican team took the Bronze.

And then I was off to the Gymnastics venue to capture the team competition.

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1 comment:

Chila Méndez said...

Hi Jeff, or as a we say here, Pura Vida...you know where I from :). Hope you´re doing fine over there.

I have a question for you, or maybe a request since you like to pann and be creative.

It's not so common to see zooming pictures, I personally get a little bit dizzy, but, maybe you can try some zooming photos just for fun. I really don´t like it a lot ja, but, I don´t know, it makes me wonder why.

Thanks.

BTW, you inspired me to take more seriously my photography hobby and my love to sports, I know is a long, long...loong way, but your passsion made me see my passion too, so thank you, love all your resources.

Pura vida.