Sölden — lessons learned

Sunny days in Sölden are history and it is back to business as usual. Stuck in Zurich for the night, flying home tomorrow. Skied in good company as you can see in the image on the right. ;-)

As I said earlier (in FB): “The fact that I was the last one over the finis­hingline beats me…”

***

Managed to get one or two decent images. But also very bad ones. One thing I did realize was that this work requires practice… even when one has done this as long as I have. Tanja was skiing with bib number three and as this was the first compe­tition of the season, the first two runs before her was all the practice I had since Val d’Isère.

And you could tell: camera was set all wrong, I lost focus after the first frame and never really got it back…

Sanni had bib number 71 and there is a definite diffe­rence in my performace:

After I had edited my images, I was so bummed with myself — I mean, she won and I shot like a bloody amateur — but I managed to get a decent shot in the evening after the prize giving, so that sort of saved my day. My journalist held the strobes and I used the side of a hospi­tality tent as a reflector. Sometimes one wonders why do we need journa­lists… but they make excellent strobestands.

By next morning I had had my practice and I felt more confident. Switched my 400mm to 600mm and shot the mens GS. You can tell the diffe­rence, even in these thumb­nails. The focus is spot on, these are practically full frames. Camera used was Canon EOS 1Dmrk3.

The most important personal achie­vement — if one can say so — of this assignment was this multi­media I did for Iltalehti and Aamulehti. They did not ask for it, I just though it might be interesting to try this out — in the real life, so to speak. Not as a demo, but as the real thing — all the way to publication, working against the clock.

What I came up with should give you some ideas of the multi­media interface and ‑workflow I have been thinking about and designing during the past couple of weeks:

You can open it by clicking on the opening screen. It contains five spherical panoramic images, twelve stills with short captions, and two audio-links with control buttons. All blended together into a nice flash-package, embedded further on a simple html-page. I did record ambient audio for all the five panos, but I ran out of time in editing, so I did not use them in the end. Would have taken an extra hour or two — time that I did not have.

Anyway, the whole compi­lation from the moment I inserted the CF-cards into the readers to the moment I uploaded the finished presen­tation to the server took c. six hours. I was working under a strict deadline, as the local media center would close at eight and I would lose my uploading channel (as I need a prior uploading permit from my ISP when working abroad).

My MacBookPro was getting very hot and I was working on too much coffee, but managed to pull this out. I counted afterwards that I used eleven different computer programs for compiling this.

Anyway, take a look — and I would really appreciate if you’d care to give some feedback. Kind of hard trying to figure things out all by oneself, getting a bit desperate sometimes as if this is the right path…

I’ll try to show you another example next week after I get the audio for that set up. And I explain a bit deeper how I envision the journa­listic multi­media in the future should look like.

Because I strongly feel: it has to be good, it has to be interesting, it has to have substance, it has to be done with meticulous attention to technical details (loading times, coding errors, etc.) — and it has to be visually challenging as well as respect the rules of good, profes­sional journalism.

Why? Because: when it comes to internet, the audience we are dealing with is actually very demanding. They can smell bad quality, arrogance and sloppy attitude miles away — and for this audience, the options are only a mouse-click away.