Vancouver Olympics, day 13: Busted Plans, Busted Knees…

Sometimes you just don’t win. And I’m talking about myself, not the Finnish athletes… who also have won absolutely nothing either. These games are slowly starting to resemble a national disaster.

But my point: I had planned to shoot a sequence of Janne Ahonen, the moment he leaves the large hill and springs forward. His style has been under a conti­nuous scrutiny lately and I thought I make an animated multi­media of his jump — first round from the start and the second round from the landing stage. A sort of conti­nuation to the multi­media piece I did of him prior to the games.

But… he fell, hurt himself (busted a knee) — and did not jump the second round. And — because he fell — nobody would really be interested about the starting stage of his jump. The only request I had the whole day was for an image of him falling.… which I naturally did not have.

And I had really worked for this: set my remote pretty far away, with an 70–200/2.8 lens and a multimax trigger. Then my other (trans­mitter) multimax decided that the games were over. Totally dead. I had a 400mm — with an extender — in my hands, trying to shoot your standard flying ski ‑jumping image… and I do not have a third hand to operate a remote manually.

But: we are in Canada, where my short experience says people are really cool, mellow and ready to help you. So I walked up to couple of volun­teers and asked if somebody could give me a hand. This really nice guy — about my age — named Bruce Peaker said “sure” right away. I set an wired remote, told him what to do and he pushed the button for me. So a big thank you to him — and I can not really credit the picture above to myself alone, as he was the one doing the actual shooting…

Shot couple of more panoramas and added one of them to the collection I posted earlier. I was happy to notice that Rob Galbraith had picked up the multi­media piece to his site — it’s always nice and an honor to get to share one’s work to a bit larger audience and colleagues.

Naturally, I follow the stats hitting my server — and everytime there is a site causing more traffic than usual, I get curious. Today I noticed that in addition to Rob Galbraith, Daily Wireless was causing a peak… and found out that they were quoting something I had written a bit earlier. I was little bit ashamed because of the picture, as it was origi­nally posted more as a joke (as you know, size does not matter…) but on the other hand, it is very rewarding to see that somebody considers things you do and write interesting and worth spreading further. But, I guess I have to start paying closer attention to my grammar and spelling.…

I started by complaining that the Finns are doing really bad in these games — and frankly, it does get kind of frustrating shooting guys finishing at places ten to fifty… But: I think I did take one or two decent pictures today. The Finnish X‑country coach Magnar Dalen meeting the press: accusing looks, accusing gestures… expla­na­tions, explanations…

But, now I have to go, I have a date with the women’s alpine team early in the morning .