Olympics in Milan: The women of USA Hockey are going for the GOLD!

It happened last night. The women of USA Hockey commanded the ice once again with a dominant 5 to 0 win over Sweden. With this tin, they move on to the gold medal game in a couple of days. Woo hoo! 

Let me take you through the game from last night.

I started shooting from the entry area, but this time decided to use the Canon R1 with the Canon RF 15-35mm lens instead of the fisheye lens. Something different. I stood at an angle to get the Olympic Rings in full view.

I zoomed back just enough to get them coming out, and still include the rings and some of the fans.

 

During the warmups, I decided to try something different as well. I saw that Hillary Knight was stretching and staying pretty still, while everyone else was skating around her. I quickly slowed down the shutter speed to 1/50 sec and focused on her. This was fun to have her sharp but the others in movement. 

My new favorite thing to do in warm-ups is to stand right behind the net (behind the glass of course) and get photos of them looking like they are shooting the puck right at me.

In between warm-ups and the first period, I saw all their sticks lined up and thought it would be a fun fisheye shot with the RF 7-14mm lens. Again, something different for the team.

The first period started with me on the offensive side, as always.

I am still looking for the ultimate fisheye shot against the boards. This was close but I want to see more faces, especially from the Americans.

The US scored a goal and I was blocked once again, I turned and fired this shot to get the celebration. I focused on the women closer to me, and even though the farther player is soft, the expression is still obvious.

More action in front of the net.

At this moment, I had Hillary Knight coming right at me. I fired off a whole bunch of frames (at 40 frames per second). I love how it is just Hillary and all the Swedes around her.

Grace Zumwinkle taking a slap shot from the blue line.

Since I am generally shooting at an aperture of f/3.5, it allows me to get my subject in focus and have the others just a little softer. 

During the game, I will often take portraits like this one, so that the team has good shots of ever player.

I was torn during the second period. Do I stay and try to get some goaltender shots or move to the other side for offense? Even though, we were so dominant, I decided to stay to get defense,  I got some good photos, but missed three goals on the other side. Ughh.

I turned and got fan reactions.

I like this shot with the puck right in front of Aerin Frankel.

Aerin delivered another shut out, so I needed some photos of her doing her thing. The team has only allowed one goal (in the first game) for this entire Olympics. Let's hope they keep it that way in a couple of days against the Canadians.

Haley Winn's brothers always make me laugh. Here they are dressed in their American eagle outfits. Hysterical!

In the third period, I was happy to be back to photographing the offense. 

I have been keying in on Hillary Knight, who is about to win her 5th Olympic medal. She is one goal away from breaking the record for goals scored by an American woman at the Olympics, and I REALLY want to get that photo! I was hoping that it would be right here, but it was not meant to be. Hopefully I will be at the right place at the right time in a couple of days.

The game ended and I was able to get a photo though the open door (and not through the increasingly scuffed plexiglass) of the team huddled up.

I was standing by the exit of the arena and saw that Joy Dunne had stopped and was looking up and her family. I quickly raised the camera up over my head and grabbed this great smile. I think this says it all.

Now...let's go get the GOLD!

Please excuse any typos. Normally I try to proofread everything before I post, but here at the Olympics, time is a commodity. I definitely miss some things. :)

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• Subscribe to the Jeff Cable Photography Blog by clicking HERE!

• Check out my upcoming photo tours to amazing places around the world. I have photo tours to Costa Rica, Peru, Galapagos, Africa, Iceland and more.

• If you are interested in purchasing ANY 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.
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Olympics in Milan: Delivering 15 Images to Team USA in less than 10 minutes!

Every two years I sit down to write a blog post about my Olympic photography workflow, and it amazes me how much changes in those 2 short years. As I have explained in many of my presentations, my deadline back in 2010 was 12 hours. That is the time the team gave me to select the photos, retouch them and deliver them. With the advent of social media and the immediacy that we are all accustomed to today, that deadline has moved up dramatically. 

Those 12 hour deadlines from 2010 have become 10 minute deadlines now!

This means that I need to download all of the photos, cull through them to find the best 15 or more images, retouch them, resize them, and get them back to the team in 10 minutes. This is not an easy task when I am blasting off 500 or more images (on two camera bodies) per period of hockey.

(Photo Credit: Kwangyeol Park)

Let me take you through that process in more detail. I am going to use a hockey game as my example. 

(Photo Credit: David McIntyre)

I have two Canon R1 cameras. One of them with an RF 70-200mm Z lens and another with the Canon RF 7-14mm fisheye lens. I use the long zoom for most of the photography, but if the players come crashing into the boards near me, I will grab the camera with the fisheye lens to try and get a fun "up close and personal" shot.

Here is the post image capture process:

1. As soon as the period has ended, I take out the memory cards from both Canon R1 cameras. These cameras are ultra fast and can capture images at a rate of 40 frames per second. For redundancy, I have the camera set to write the RAW files to two memory cards at the same time. I love that the Canon R1 has two high speed CFExpress card slots, so I can write really fast to both cards and not worry about filling the buffer.

2. I put each of the ProGrade Digital Iridium cards (which are the fastest on the market) into the ProGrade USB 4 reader (also the fastest). Believe it or not, I can download all the RAW images from the period into my MacBook Pro 16" in less than 30 seconds. That is AMAZING!!! I remember when this process took more than 15 minutes.

3. I am using Photo Mechanic (like every other photographer here at the Olympics) because it is the fastest software on the market for culling through images. I jam through everything and mark the photos I like the best. Since I have done this for a long time, my eye is pretty well trained to find the best images, and do it quickly. I do not have time to delete the rejects at this time, but rename all the files to something like "USAH-Men-vs-Germany-0001" and so on.

4. I then select the filter in the software to show me only the images that I marked as favorites.

5. I go through those images and either retouch all of them (depending on how many I selected), or the best of the best. I do that in Adobe Photoshop. At the Olympics, we are not allowed to modify the images or clone things out, so I am simply adjusting the exposure, the shadows and highlights, cropping, straightening, and that is about it.

6. After I have the retouched images completed (usually within 8 minutes), I select them and have Photo Mechanic resize them and add them to a predefined Dropbox folder. 

7. I send a text message to the team, letting them know that the images are uploaded.

8. I use the remaining 8 minutes of the period to stretch my legs.

9. After the game is over, I am still in the same spot doing this same process. I stay there because I do not want to delay the process by packing up my gear and walking to the press room. Other than the maintenance people, I am always the last person on the glass.

10. If I get a seat on the metro heading back to my hotel (which takes about an hour), I will go through all the images from the game and delete the photos that are out of focus, showing nothing interesting, or not peak of action. Out of the 2000 images I capture during a typical game, I will keep around 600.

11. When I return to my hotel room, I may do some additional retouching (with the very cool Wacom Movink graphics tablet which you see above) and then I back up the images onto at least one Pro Grade Digital external SSD. I also move any favorite images to the cloud. I have my QNAP RAID system back in California set to retrieve all my favorite images automatically.

12. I save my favorite images of the day to a resolution of 2500 pixels and add them to my Milan 2026 web page hosted by Zenfolio. I also select a bunch of favorites and save them to a smaller resolution (1100 pixels and watermarked) to share with you on this blog.

13. Then it is time to recharge everything. My MacBook Pro 16" battery lasts so long now, that for the first time at any Olympics, I never charge during the day. At night, I recharge the MacBook Pro, my camera batteries, my iPhone and my Apple Watch. 

14. By this point, it is usually around 1:30am and I call back home to check in with my loved ones. I try to go to sleep before 2:30am to recharge MY batteries! 

15. I set my alarm to wake up at 9:30 since I do not want to miss breakfast. Hey, it's free and I need to get my coffee! After I eat, I start working on the next blog posts (like I am doing now). I also write these blogs on trains, in press rooms, or any free time I might have.

This is me blogging rink side.

16. After writing a blog, responding to social media questions, and trying to reply to all emails, I then shower and pack up my ThinkTank bag for the next day, to start the whole process again.

The pressure increases, but the technology is keeping pace with the demands.

I should also mention that before the game even starts, I have created a folder in Dropbox with the date, game title, and folders for each period. I have color calibrated my Mac using the Spyder Pro to make sure that my monitor is showing me the correct colors (which I do every couple of months). I also have all my IPTC caption information set for the game. For those of you unfamiliar with IPTC captioning, it is the information embedded into every photo, showing my copyright information, my contact info, the game details and much more.

Writing all this is making me tired! :)

A typical blog post will take me around an hour to write. Some, like this one, take longer. All of this work is fun for me. I love sharing this experience and getting so much feedback from you all. I know that I am very fortunate to be able to photograph the Olympics. Even though this is my 9th Olympics, I promise you I still appreciate it like it was my first. 

 

Please excuse any typos. Normally I try to proofread everything before I post, but here at the Olympics, time is a commodity. I definitely miss some things. :)

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• Subscribe to the Jeff Cable Photography Blog by clicking HERE!

• Check out my upcoming photo tours to amazing places around the world. I have photo tours to Costa Rica, Peru, Galapagos, Africa, Iceland and more.

• If you are interested in purchasing ANY 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.
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Olympics in Milan: The Men's second and third ice hockey games

Today I am going to combine two different hockey games for the men into one post. I am doing so for two reasons:

1. I am trying to get caught up and have two big blog posts coming soon.

2. The second game for the men did not yield all that many great shots.  Sometimes that means that luck was not on my side, as the best action happened on the other side of the rink, or maybe I just was off my game. 

So here we go...

The second hockey game was against Denmark. I started by taking my typical warm-up shots. I saw Matt Boldy tossing the puck with his stick and caught this moment.

Hey look, a goaltender smiling!

Then there is Auston Matthews who almost never gives me a smile, but then again he was in game mode.

I was photographing the action, but missed the goal being scored...

...but I did catch this reaction, which I love. This was the best shot of the game for me. I was lucky that when Matt scored, he turned and skated in my direction.

I liked the way that these three players were stacked up nicely for a shot.

Tage Thompson took the shot, but it was deflected to the left of the net.

A little more action in the front of the net.

I don't usually take photos of the puck drop, since they are usually not very interesting. This time I decided to shoot the drop and I like the end result, with the puck just between the two sticks.

I got this shot as the puck was heading right for Jeremy Swayman. He had a tough game that night. The puck ended up going into the net on this one. A good photo, but I doubt that the team will use it for that reason.

A nice stop by the opposing goaltender. And that was about it for the best from that game. Moving to the game against Germany last night.

I saw one of my favorite super-fans at the game and took this fisheye shot of Brent Folan from below.

 

Things were looking a little better for me last night, as I caught the puck going into the net for this goal.

I also got the celebration. Two for two. Yay!

Another goal caught with the puck just entering the net. 

For the second period, I managed to capture multiple images of Connor Hellebuyck stopping the puck with his stick.

I did not get this goal since my view was blocked by some other skaters and a referee (arghh), but I got the celebration.

I was shooting on the other side of the ice to capture defensive action when the US got a power play. I decided to quickly move to the offensive side, assuming most of the action would be on that side. I figured that I may have a chance to photograph another goal, and I was right. I love that I got the puck just on the goal line again. 

Then I was back to the defensive side. I love the wide eyes of Hellebuyck as he tracks the puck.

During the third period, I missed another goal being scored but got more reaction.

We almost got a goal here.

This shot made me laugh. I was using the Canon RF 7-14mm fisheye lens to try and grab some wide shots. I ended up holding the camera away from the glass and got my ghost-like reflection in the photo. :)

Another "almost goal" shot.

This check happened right against the boards in front of me. It was the best "crunch" shot yet. The other funny thing is...my MacBook Pro was leaning against the boards and went flying from the impact on the wall. All good, it is still working perfectly. Two more wins for the men, and tonight is the women's semifinal game. Let's go ladies!!!

Please excuse any typos. Normally I try to proofread everything before I post, but here at the Olympics, time is a commodity. I definitely miss some things. :)

__________________________________________________________

• Subscribe to the Jeff Cable Photography Blog by clicking HERE!

• Check out my upcoming photo tours to amazing places around the world. I have photo tours to Costa Rica, Peru, Galapagos, Africa, Iceland and more.

• If you are interested in purchasing ANY 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.
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