U.S.A. soccer pulls off the upset! Photograph by Donald Miralle for NEWSWEEK

U.S.A. Softball gets upset. Photograph by Donald Miralle for NEWSWEEK

The last couple days I just feel it slipping. My interest in photos is fading, I’m finding it harder to get out of bed in the morning, and I just seem to be missing things or making mistakes. And when I’m not making mistakes my cameras are either backfocusing or not working all together. It’s like there is a little gremlin in my camera back that is sabotaging my Games. For example, today was the first time I was granted access to placing an underwater camera in the pool (unfortunately for me it was for women’s synchro, not Phelps) and I flooded a camera in one of my housings when I first jumped in the water. In 10 years, and hundreds of times in the water, I have only ruined one camera. But this time I just didn’t check everything twice before hopping in, and next thing I know the housing is filled like an aquarium. To top it all off, the camera that was ruined was not mine. I luckily packed two housings, so after dropping some f-bombs on the pool deck, I placed the back-up system in the water.

I’m not sure if it’s that I’m just worn down from shooting, editing, and blogging everyday, or if I’m just missing home, but I just feel like I can’t get it going. I feel that I’ve made a strong set of photos to this point and would love to finish it off strong, but the last couple of days I’ve been down and out. It’s been a great assignment for NEWSWEEK, with much of the creative control and scheduling of this assignment left in our hands. Kudos to Simon Barnett and the photo staff at NEWSWEEK for giving us this opportunity and placing us in this position. Nevertheless, I feel a bit depressed and in a funk, and one of my close friends commented, “don’t go to that dark place” when he saw me yesterday. The truth is the Olympics is a very long and stressful few weeks for any photographer, especially if you are leaving family back at home. I feel like every Games I do shaves a couple years off the back-end of my life. But for me it is the pinnacle of sports photography, where the finest sports photographers in the world congregate to shoot the top athletes in an arena that transcends sports. I just want to get this thing wrapped up on a good note and get back to the comforts of home and family.

Photograph by Donald Miralle for NEWSWEEK

 

Photograph by Donald Miralle for NEWSWEEK

Photograph by Vincent Laforet for NEWSWEEK

Photographers don't generally relish shooting podium pictures because they so rarely yield a good image. Typically, they reluctantly shoot the ceremony so they can say they "have it" should their bosses back at the office ask for it later. But on occasion, a picture of real quality presents itself, as it does here. In my selection for Picture of the Day, by Vincent Laforet, you see a wonderful version of the podium picture, showing the American beach volleyball duo of Misty May-Treanor (right) and Kerri Walsh as they enjoy their moment of gold-medal glory. Adding to the dramatic quality of the picture is the wonderfully dense color palate, which is the result of the heavily overcast cloud conditions of the day. It's perhaps not the most technically challenging picture Vince has made, but it is a moving and memorable photograph of athletic accomplishment nonetheless.—Simon Barnett, Director of Photography, NEWSWEEK

Photograph by Mike Powell for NEWSWEEK

I don't smoke but it just sounds cooler than "coffee and Powerbars."

So coffee has stopped working sometime in the last couple of days. I can’t seem to get a buzz off a large coffee with a double red eye. Or whatever it’s supposed to be called. All I know is this would normally get me running up the walls, but now, not so much…the net effect is that when I shot a half a game of handball on my way over to the track I was a step behind the players and didn’t make a single snap. Fortunately when I got to the more familiar ground of the track things improved.

Photograph by Mike Powell for NEWSWEEK

Photograph by Mike Powell for NEWSWEEK

Photograph by Mike Powell for NEWSWEEK

Photograph by Mike Powell for NEWSWEEK

Photograph by Mike Powell for NEWSWEEK

Photograph by Mike Powell for NEWSWEEK

What a day--I'm amazed that not only I, but also my cameras and lenses survived. At 6 a.m., after only two hours of sleep, I got a call from Simon Barnett to strategize on the remaining four days of the Olympics. Little did Simon know he was cutting into 1/3 of my bedtime for the night. But it was time to go anyway--even though I would have bet a healthy sum of money that there was absolutely no way that the gold medal match of women's beach volleyball was going to be played in the conditions I was seeing out of my hotel window. The rain was torrential.

There's only one thing that a photographer dreads more than going hours early to a game/event that s/he knows will most definitely be rained out--and that's getting up ridiculously early to do just that! You get there 2-4 hours early and sit and wait forever--never quite getting a chance to make up for that lost sleep. And there's just nothing more miserable than having to go out to make a "rain feature." You get wet, cold and if you have them--your glasses completely fog up. Every time you pull out a lens cloth to dry something--you're never really sure if you're going to help things or end up making things much worse by smudging goo all over your lenses.

This morning, every bone in my body told me there was absolutely no way they would play beach volleyball in these horrid conditions--let alone a gold medal match. Nonetheless, I called the venue manager for the site--and he insisted that the games would go on. The communication over the phone was far from perfect as usual--but it wasn't the fear of things lost being lost in translation that caused me to second-guess him and to call a second time--I just didn't want to believe that they could possibly play in these conditions! "We play in much bigger bigger storm few days ago" he told me--and so I headed onto the early bus--RELUCTANTLY. You just don't want to be "that guy" that missed the gold medal win because he chose to hit the snooze button and adhere to common sense.

The image above was made with a fisheye lens. It's a shot I thought of making early in the morning before I left the hotel because I knew how unusual it seemed to me to have such an important contest fought in such adverse conditions. Hey--its' BEACH volleyball!!!   I set the lens to f22 and used the hyperfocal to get the drops in focus as much as possible... one Italian photographer just didn't understand that I was purposely allowing the waterdrops to fall on my lens... he kept screaming at me to cover the front element of my lens with my towel... that was actually the last thing I wanted to do.

As I arrived at the venue the rain was actually dying down. Suddenly I felt so relieved not to have followed my instincts to bag this assignment and go back to sleep. But as the match was about to start, the sky turned a much darker shade of gray and within minutes we were all absolutely completely and utterly soaked. Two photographers were better prepared than I was:  Robert Beck of Sports Illustrated and Erich Schlegel of the Dallas Morning News were smart enough to show up in their swimming trunks--now that's being prepared!

One of the reasons that photographers hate shooting in the rain is the rain covers we use. I own three brands, and none of them work 100%. In fact, they're a total nightmare.  They're designed to keep your camera and lens dry, but they make it impossible to quickly change lenses (doing so  exponentially increases your change of shorting a contact point or getting the rear lens element of your lens wet anyway) and shooting can be close to impossible at times. If you hold you camera upright for even a second, you now have rain drops on the front of your lens, decreasing image quality to a good degree. Hold it downward and you have raindrops--or in this case, sand--in your rear eye-cup. On more than one occasion I couldn't even reach the zoom ring on my lenses, as I was fighting the elastics on the rain covers for control. It's frankly a total disaster to shoot with these things and toward the final point I just ripped everything off. Problem was: most of the covers had the camera straps put through them, so I couldn't get them off and out of the way, and then the covers got in the way of the lenses etc. Total, total disaster...I'm very lucky that I did not miss more shots than I did today...

Here is the initial reaction of the U.S.A. duo: