Schierer Space

If you haven’t been following the adventures of Newsweek photographers Vincent Laforet, Donald Miralle ad Mike Powell at the Olympics, you’re missing a great opportunity. As all of you readers know, I’m an amateur photographer with aspirations for a few great shots. These guys are the best in the world shooting in a two week marathon of photography moments. They talk about the technical, physical and emotional challenges involved in capturing emotionally and literally dynamic events in still frames.
I posted about Vincent’s packing exploits to start off the series, but I think the posts have gotten even better as we’ve gone along.
They’re sharing a unique perspective on what it takes to get unique perspectives on this media circus of a sporting event: the technically strategic challenge of being in the right place (or several places) at the right time after hours (days!) of planning the perfect shot, the emotion of ‘discovering’ a new sport, the catharsis of introspection… it’s just been a great ride so far.

Keep it up guys!!

So the highly publicized M$ Silverlight based viewer for the online Olympics footage is inconvenient at best and painful at worst. I’ve crashed it twice already. The much publicized ‘view 4 events at once’ is useless because rather than splitting the display 4 ways, you are in a sort of ‘video control room’ where the images are less than tiny.

I’m trying to watch the women’s fencing from last night and your choices are basically watch it or not. There is a slider that might theoretically allow you to move around in the broadcast. Just like in Media Player, the slider is about 3 inches long, this wouldn’t be a big problem if the broadcast weren’t 3+ hours long. So the smallest adjustment in the slider is about 7-10 minutes. How hard would it be to have a finer adjustment?

Oh, and as expected, you’re forced to watch a commercial before the viewer actually goes active to watch the event itself.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain TOO much, after all, I wouldn’t be able to see any events other than gymnastics, swimming and basketball if it weren’t for the online feed.

Amusing note: The theme from The Rock was playing in the background before the first bout.

With NBC providing thousands of hours of Olympic coverage with broadcast, cable and online viewing available there is an overwhelming amount of viewing available. Now I hate watching the 45 second highlight clips intermixed with 45 minute human interest stories that make the prime-time Olympic magazine show. I want to sit down and watch some event to see what it is, or how it works and become an armchair judge (or in the case of Laser sailing… maybe learn something).

So I’m VERY disappointed in the NBC broadcast listings on their website. At first glance it seems like a lot of thought went into organizing the event and broadcast information, but extracting useful information from the NBC broadcast megaplex is nearly impossible.
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Vincent Laforet, who is shooting the Olympics for Newsweek, is running a blog documenting his experiences. I’m not sure if I will follow this throughout the games, but his post about packing for the trip is pretty interesting.

If you can’t be bothered to read the post, at least flip through the image gallery of his packing.

All I can say is: “Mmmmm….. gear.”