It's official - I got my Vancouver Winter Olympic CREDENTIALS today!!!

It is now three weeks away from the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and I just received my credentials from the USOC and Team USA Hockey. Reality hits!

I am getting prepared. Trying to figure out the best way to carry all my equipment ON the plane and thinking about all the logistics once I get there. I plan on blogging every day that I am there, with new images from the day and some behind-the-scenes stories. I encourage you and your friends to join my "Jeff Cable Photography" page on Facebook to get the updates.

And...the fun begins soon!

No shortage of poise and personality here!

Yesterday I had the good fortune to photograph Hannah's Bat Mitzvah and the party in the evening. As her dad said after the service, "She nailed it!". As I steadied the camera and captured the images, I had a hard time believing that this girl was only 13 (well...technically still 12). She was so confident and articulate. And the best part for the photographer, she never stopped smiling for 2 hours!


Within minutes of arriving at the Corinthian Event Center, I saw Hannah spinning on the dance floor. I asked her to do that once again and caught this image. Actually, I captured a number of images during this spin, but I like this one the best due to the positioning of her hands, dress and feet, and best of all the smile on her face. It is images like this one that make me glad to be a photographer. I captured an image that, I think, defines her poise, her confidence and her pure enjoyment of the day.

This was one of the nicest party venues that I have worked, and the people were amazingly well organized. Since I was not feeling very good yesterday (combining a messed up stomach with broken ribs), any help was greatly appreciated! This image, which provides a very cool overall shot of the party, was taken from a balcony area three stories above the party.

I took this image on a tripod so that I could drag the shutter of the camera (1/5 of a second) to get some of the motion of the dancing. I combined this with a diffused flash to add a little light to the image. Whenever they beak out the glow sticks, I try to get a fun image like this.

Before the party started, I was messing around with the camera and trying some fun tricks and grabbed this motion shot of Joy and her two daughters. Again, I combined a slow shutter speed with an on-camera flash. The trick to this shot is to move the camera as you shoot. The flash will freeze the nearby subjects while the slow shutter will drag enough to distort the background. I think that this is a much more interesting (and fun) image than the straight mother/daughter shot most people would take.

San Francisco Fire Department - Firehouse #34

Earlier this week I had a chance to shoot images with my good friends, Moose Peterson, Joe McNally and Laurie Excell. All great photographers and really good people! We made a trip to Firehouse #34, which is right by the Cliff House area of San Francisco. This station is unique in that they have a rig specifically for water rescues. And growing up in the city, I would always hear about people getting swept to sea from the cliffs. They do keep busy!


We wanted to capture images that showed the uniqueness of this firehouse, so we had them position this truck in the station with much of the gear showing. Trish is a firefighter who works this particular rig and we had a great time capturing images of her in front of her rescue tools.

And this is a picture of the Captain of the station. I positioned him to the side of the firetruck so that I had good colors behind him. As you can tell, I used the rotating emergency lights from the truck to give me interesting lighting behind him. The trick in this image was shooting at the right time, so that the lights were part of the background and not pointing right at the lens of my camera (which caused lens flare).

Pictures from the John Legend Concert (with a special appearance by Stevie Wonder)

Last week I was in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. I was not feeling great, so I basically took it easy when I was not doing my work at the show. But on my last night there, I was offered a ticket to Monster Cable's concert, featuring John Legend and I took advantage of that offer. I grabbed my camera (since it was a private party with no camera restrictions) and headed off to the Paris Hotel.

All of my best lenses were at home in CA and I only had my Tamron 28-300 variable aperture lens for this trip. I pushed the ISO of the Canon 5D Mark II to ISO3200, but I also knew that for good shots I would have to get in close. Plus, I was not content shooting images from the back of the room. So I worked my way past the three levels of security and found myself a couple of feet from the stage. While I was there, I took full advantage of the position and fired off a bunch of shots.


I really had fun keying in on John Legend while taking advantage of the stage lighting in the background.





I like this shot because it shows the throng of photographers at the front of the stage (before they kicked us all out of the area). And then I started moving around, to get some different perspectives.




I stood in the back of the room (on a raised platform) and shot this image. I wanted to get a wide shot showing the full band and some of the crowd. Even though the close-up shots are really cool, this image helps show the whole environment.

And then...when we thought it was all over, they announced a guest appearance by Stevie Wonder. At that point, I was at the back of the room, but this was too great an opportunity to pass up, so I had to make yet another trip past security to get this shot!

And then, about an hour and a half later, the show was over and I headed back to my room to download and see what I had captured.

Another image of the Las Vegas Strip

I took this picture from my room (in the Ballys Hotel) on Wednesday night. I saw this really nice sunset unfolding in front of me and quickly set up the tripod for this shot. The trick to this shot is to get close to the glass, turn off all the lights in the room (to avoid reflections), and try to hold something dark behind the camera to further reduce any glare. On this shot, I did all those things but still had a bit of a reflection in the upper left hand side of the image. Using Adobe Photoshop, I had to do some repair work to remove the distraction.

Trying to find some beauty in Las Vegas

Honestly, there is very little that I like about Las Vegas. I am always here for conventions and get really tired of the cigarette smoke, loud noise and crowds. Not to mention the 27 mile hike from the lobby of the hotel to my room.

But amongst all that frustration, there are a couple of sites which I do appreciate. The fountains at the Bellagio Hotel really are cool, and make for some great photos. Since I am staying across the street and had a free hour last night at 10pm, I walked over in the cold and shot images from 3 of the shows.

The great thing about these "performances" is that there are almost endless possibilities when it comes to photos. Every second provides a different scene to capture.

This shot above is a combination of two exposures so that the fountains did not completely blow out the image. I have one exposure for the hotels and a second exposure for the fountains. How did I do that with moving fountains? I processed the RAW image twice and layered them in PhotoShop.

I really like the patterns created by the fountains in this image.


And here, I decided to crop out the fountains and just show the spray coming up into the skyline. I think that the symmetry of the lines makes this more interesting without the fountains and water. What do you think?

Just messing around in a museum in Santa Cruz, CA

We made a quick trip (and I mean REALLY quick trip, we are talking about 30 minutes here) to Santa Cruz on Sunday. We were nearby and decided to stop by and the see the model train setup at a local museum. The model train was disappointing to the kids (and us) but we had fun checking out the rest of the museum and grabbing some shots along the way.

This is a picture of my wife's cousin's daughter (whatever that makes her). There was a rather interesting display of hanging "banners" from the ceiling. I had her walk into the middle of the display and shot this image. My goal was to show the artwork but also draw attention to her very cute eyes.

I shot this hanging over the edge of the staircase. I was trying to get a shot of some other hanging sculpture, and this little girl happened to walk into the perfect spot and peer up at the right time. This would have been a throw-away shot if it wasn't for the little girl looking up in wonder. (I also like her shadow which helps to fill the emptiness of the floor.)

This is my son Connor and my two nephews (Philip and Sean). I really liked the blue wall behind them, so I went down to a different level and shot back up at them. I took some images of them looking directly at me, but liked this one better. If they only had a band, this could be there CD cover image. :)

Ahhh - The Good Old Days

About an hour South of Mammoth Lakes, CA is a small town called Bishop. Within this town they have a very cool area where they have maintained old buildings, trains, tractors... I went out there with my photo mentor and friend, Moose Peterson. We both brought along our son's to capture their images along side us.

This shot was taken inside of an old store. There was a ton of old stuff in this building, but I like this shot because of the colors of the containers. There was glass in front of all of the displays, so I had to get my lens right up the glass in order to avoid glare.

Like the store, the printing building had a ton of different old printing presses and old typewriters. Shooting at f4 allowed me to key in on the old typewriter while still showing all of the lettering drawers in the background.

They had some old coaches, but I was drawn more to the old wheels which were up against the wall of the carriage house. I liked the intersecting circles and the different colored parts against the stone wall.

A view from outside which shows some of the old mechanical parts in the foreground and the snow covered mountains in the back. This shot gives more of a sense of place.

For many reasons, this is one of my favorite shots from the town. I like the old car and the old gas pump, but I also like buildings in the background and the cloud formations in the sky. As I learned years ago, most good pictures have an interesting foreground (car), mid-ground (buildings) and background (sky). This image was created using HDR (High Dynamic Range) which combined 5 different exposures to get the final image.

Having Fun (and Shooting) In The Snow

The family made our annual December trip to Mammoth Lakes, CA to go skiing, sledding and just relax. And, of course, I always look forward to capturing images in the snow. This is the only time of the year when I can easily get good images of our big black dog, Bailey. The snow acts like a giant light reflector and helps me light that cute face of his. And this time, like before, Bailey was joined by his "cousin dog" Ike for some canine fun.

A shot of Ike running at me. This was captured at 1/800th of a second to freeze the action. With all that light, I was able to grab this at ISO 100 at f5.6. I like the shot of Ike but I also like the reflections from the trees in the background giving more dimension to the snow.

Here is Bailey looking very regal. He did me a favor by stopping in his tracks by the brush (and leaving some nice clean snow in the background. Thanks Bailey boy!

Nonstop fun for the dogs which also meant nonstop shooting for me. I metered these shots at +0.3 to get a little more light on the dogs (since the cameras still get fooled by that white snow).

I love this shot because it shows my son being a good big brother and helping his sister get launched. I focused on my daughter but kept the aperture at f6.3 so that my son would be just slightly out of focus. The attention is drawn to Ali but you still see Connor helping out.

This is my nephew, Shane, being a crazy kid. He is absolutely fearless and was going off the jump and facing me to get a cool picture for his room. He was wearing a green jacket which was blending into the background, so being the bad uncle (but good photographer), I asked him to take off his jacket and gloves) so that his red shirt would stand out in the picture.

The snow is a great place to take group shots too!


I love capturing kids being kids. The trick to getting these pictures is to keep your shutter speed at least 1/200 sec (at the very minimum) and have your focus mode in Servo focus (as Canon calls it). This means that as you burst images and the subject is coming closer to you, the focus is changing with each shot.

More hockey? This Time It Was Connor's Team

Connor asked me to shoot his hockey game this weekend and, as a good father, I did this for him. It was also a good chance to try the Canon 1D Mark IV one more time before sending it back to Canon :(

The lighting in this roller rink is really bad and I had to crank the ISO of the camera to 4000. Yep - that is 4000, not 400! It was really the only way to capture the images in focus. I did use NIK Dfine (software for removing digital noise), but even so, the images were very usable.








For those photographers out there, you will notice that the white balance is different in almost every shot. This is partially due to the editing, but mostly due to the really weird lighting at this rink. The lighting will be much better than this in Vancouver, but it is still a very good test of shooting in a brutal environment.

A Trip To Vancouver: Preparing For The Winter Olympics

I am just returning from trip #2 to Vancouver and just got a tour of the new Main Press Center (MPC) which is still in construction. Although it is not as big as the MPC in Beijing, it is pretty impressive. All of the photo and print Press will be working in this modified convention center (pictured with the colorful "sails" above) and the broadcast Press will be next door in the International Broadcast Center (IBC). I was only in Vancouver for about 24 hours but I made the most of the visit. It rained for most of the time that I was in the city, but it cleared enough last night that I hopped in my rental car at 11pm and went back to Stanley Park (just across from downtown) and shot this picture. With each passing day, I get more excited to be able to photograph the events of the games! As the photo manager told me today, "You have the Golden Ticket for the Games."