I’ll be covering my third Olympics this month and I’m going to blog about it on my work blog. The first post is up, a short post where people can ask questions:

http://166.70.44.68/blogs/trent/2010/02/covering-the-vancouver-olympics-qa-1/

As we go, I’ll post links here to my Olympics posts.

I often wonder if the professional standards of journalism are drying up in the current economic climate. I was talking to a friend of mine, a photographer who was assigned to shoot a high school wrestling meet. He was given a specific list of instructions for the shapes and sizes that his photos were required to be from each match. For example: regular horizontal for match 1, mid-vertical for match 2, etc. I couldn’t believe it. It had to be one of the more ridiculous (and insulting) things I’d heard of in a long time. Such instructions only serve to turn your creative and talented photographer into a robot.

Any editor will tell you that there are times that a photographer needs to hit a specific shape, especially in a scenario where the photo is coming in on deadline. But such pre-planning should be the last resort. Editors of the world, you are lowering the quality of your photo report every time you give a photographer a shape to shoot to. You cannot accurately predict the shape of the best photograph and when a photographer is limited to a specific shape, he/she will not be able to do his/her best work.

The best example I can think of right now is a spectacular photo my colleague Chris Detrick took at a basketball game a couple years back. It showed a guy practically getting his eyes poked out, and it later appeared in Sports Illustrated before winning a ton of awards. Guess what? It was a horizontal photograph. What if we’d planned on a mid-vertical that day? The award-winning photo doesn’t make the paper.

And now that I’ve used that term twice, just what is a “mid-vertical”? Syntax error: I have no idea what that means.

I think back to the film days when everything was harder and took longer. Even then I was never given a shape to shoot for even though we had much less time to shoot deadline stories and weren’t laying out the paper on a computer. In a pinch we would plan on a horizontal or a vertical and adapt as things came in.

The deadline was a firm 10pm and you had to account for the time to develop your film and scan in your shot. Editors sketched out their page layouts on paper and handed them off to be built by a paginator who worked on a scary computer terminal straight out of the 1980s. And still, with that serious lack of technology and tools, I can’t tell you how many times we would get a photo scanned in at 9:55 for the sports guy to size it up with a ruler (a physical, wooden ruler!) to build his page at the very last minute. Even in that tight of a crunch, the photos were edited well and displayed beautifully in the paper.

In today’s modern age, newspapers have slick page layout software that allows editors to re-size photos, auto-flow text, etc. but for some reason it seems harder to put the paper together even with all of the speedy technology.

I know there are often good reasons that people come up with ideas like the wrestling shape list that my friend’s editor gave him. But I’m more interested in quality that convenience. Having the highest quality product is always the greater reason for doing something.

I make a motion that newspapers world-wide try to publish the best photos. Period.

Will anyone second that?

I posted this on utahpj a couple of weeks ago, but it should be here as well. From the World Cup at Deer Valley. This shot was only possible at this exact moment. The cloud was gone after this skier went by.

I was bugged standing on the hill at Deer Valley for the World Cup Aerials finals last week. It wasn’t the cold conditions, or my weak batteries that were getting me down. It was the shooting conditions. Before I go further, it was nothing about Deer Valley. They organize a perfect event every time, and in the small world of winter sports they stand out as one of the best.

Here’s what was bugging me about the shooting conditions… Photographing world class skiers flipping through the air is very cool, but the finals are at night so you’ve got them against a black sky which takes away all context. The best shots of aerials are usually during the day from way up top behind the jumps looking down toward the crowd, and I hadn’t been able to make it to the earlier qualifying session with its dazzling blue sky. Winter sports photography tip: Shoot action during the qualifying and emotion during the finals.

Another annoyance is that a still photo never really captures the skill and technique of this sport. So what do you do when you end up with a thousand-plus photos of flipping skiers on a plain black background? I needed something different from last year. Here’s what came to mind…

That is Olga Volkova’s jump, in nine frames from left to right. And that’s kind of a fun way to look at it, but why stop there?

Here are the lady skiers from the finals in order of their results, gold medal on top, down to twelfth place at the bottom…

It makes for an eye-catching poster. And check out the Chinese skiers in red taking five of the top six spots. Here are the men…

With a little bit of thinking, the very thing that bugged me about the conditions— that boring black background— was turned into an asset and something cool was created. Stop by some day and see the 16×20 inch prints on my wall.