Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games photographed by Jay Goodrich

Vancouver 2010 – The Olympics – Part 2 – The Context

4 Man Bobsleigh, Whistler Sliding Center, 2010 Olympics, © Jay Goodrich

In my first post regarding my visit to the 2010 Winter Olympics, I discussed an image and fascination with the bobsleigh since childhood. With this post I want to take the photographic process a little further and talk about image context. Any time that I shoot a story or idea, whether it be a personal project or an assignment for a client, I create a series of images in my head (and notebook) that I think would illustrate it. After I captured the high-speed image from my previous post, I was looking to create an image that captured the event, the people, the weather, the time of year, and the environment of the location. As I was walking up the Whistler Sliding Center course I noticed a view corridor through a stand of fir trees that allowed me to frame my subject. It was snowing extremely hard at the time and experience has taught me that fast shutter speeds can stop that falling snow, which in turn would work for the sled that was cruising along at 80 plus miles an hour.

This location quickly became my context photograph for this event of the 2010 Olympic Games. The only problem was the difficulty in creating it. I was for the most part shooting blind. Lucky for me I had 6 free assistants standing over my shoulders. They were the friends that I was visiting with. After missing my first image, I figured out the timing of where the bobsleigh was going to be when I needed to release the shutter. I had two of my friends coordinate that location together and give me the standing 10 count to shutter release. The image above is the result of multiple people simply understanding what I was looking for and shouting to me at the perfect moment in time. Mission accomplished, an image that shows the weather, the environment, the spectators, the event, and even the year.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 8:00 am. It is filed under articles, events, photography tips and tagged with image context, photographic process, Vancouver 2010 Olympics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.