This is an embarrassment! It's amateur hour at its worst... Unflattering wide angles, crap lighting, bad composition & what is with using that beat up old roll of white seamless?
Honestly looks like one of the athlete's Moms volunteered to do the shoot with zero prior experience.
I dread to think how much money was blown on this....
The Germans didn't do much better either.... Blown out highlights & weak composition...
After looking at these shoots I don't know why anyone would even bother working on lighting, composition & retouching skills when that's the standard being hired.... It's obvious that poor amateur techniques are the new black.
The Olympics are supposed to be about excellence.... The photography commissioned is at the polar opposite end of the spectrum... It's total shit. What a joke
H3D PHOTOGRAPHER wrote: This is an embarrassment! It's amateur hour at its worst... Unflattering wide angles, crap lighting, bad composition & what is with using that beat up old roll of white seamless?
Honestly looks like one of the athlete's Moms volunteered to do the shoot with zero prior experience.
I dread to think how much money was blown on this....
You have got to be kidding me. These are atrocious. Add that to the level at which the photographer needed to be performing and it increases in fail factor by orders of magnitude. So you have some horrendously bad images. At that point, whoever let these into the public eye is an idiot. They should have scrapped the whole thing and re-shot it all.
If the intention of the photographer was to show that these athletes are regular people, and just like regular people, they get their photograph taken by some family member that just unboxed their very first camera, I think he succeeded wildly.
I seriously hope they stopped payment on the check to this clown. Worse yet, how can they even allow these to circulate? NO photos are better than these horrible ones.
If the photographer had even an ounce of integrity, he should volunteer to contact someone else to do a reshoot. He should be embarrassed.
Obviously this was all deliberate. Still though, in his effort to be some avant garde "Arteest", he's created a world full of hatred toward his work.
The most pathetic part is, his little stunt worked. Now he's all the buzz online and you just know he's going to get a million bookings out of all this.
The more I think about this, the more it bothers me. In my mind, there is no question that this is deliberate, and that just irks me even more. Look, if you want to be an Arteest, do it on your own time. What this jerk did was a pretty big deal. It's not about making athletes look "like gods", it has to do with respect.
What fucktards like Joe Klamar don't seem to grasp is that these athletes put 1 million times more effort into their dreams than that asshole will ever know. I personally know four people who have been in the Olympics, two of which have received medals.
The vast majority of our population has absolutely no clue in the world the amount of work and devotion it takes to become Olympic quality. For most of these athletes they start training at a very early age. For virtually every day of their lives they are going to practice with coaches all while juggling schoolwork. It's day after day after day of practice, practice, practice. It's parents supporting their kids by driving them all over to practices, competitions, etc. It's not only a time expense, but a monetary one too...all this doesn't come cheap. It's strict diet regimens and sleep schedules. It's dealing with injuries and frustrations. And all those years and years worth of tireless effort builds up to just one day. JUST ONE DAY, when they get to represent their country with great pride and show the world that all their years of work is going to pay off. They work their ASSES off for virtually their entire lives and after doing so, they make the US Olympic Team. It is quite literally, the dream of their life come true.
So then they show up to a photo shoot with this photographer who has this vision that perhaps he shouldn't do a nice, respectful shoot with them. No, instead he's going to change things up a bit and shoot all of them in a way that not only disrespects them, but disrespects the entire nation who supports them. This clown deserves as much public humiliation that the world can throw at him and it's astounding that anyone allowed him to publish these photos. The sad part is, there are probably hundreds, if not thousands of better qualified photographers out there (myself included) that would kill to have the opportunity to do a shoot with these amazing ambassadors of our country. Hell, there are probably thousands of AMATEUR photographers who would die for the chance to shoot these folks and would do a 1000X better job than this bozo did.
Obviously this was all deliberate. Still though, in his effort to be some avant garde "Arteest", he's created a world full of hatred toward his work.
The most pathetic part is, his little stunt worked. Now he's all the buzz online and you just know he's going to get a million bookings out of all this.
Well, that shows you the "judgement" of awards. Also looks like he does this to supplement his income as the owner of a bed and breakfast. IOW, it's a hobby for him just as for any GWC.
In Balance Photography wrote: If the intention of the photographer was to show that these athletes are regular people, and just like regular people, they get their photograph taken by some family member that just unboxed their very first camera, I think he succeeded wildly.
What he also showed was that he was just some guy with a camera.
One should not always take every job offered.
I was asked to shoot a wedding and I told the bride, "I'm not goin got do the wedding but I'm going to give you a little piece of advice: Hire the best professional wedding photographer that you can afford."
I'd say in this case, the Olympic team skimped out on the dollars and hired someone who wasn't as experienced as he should have been. But the photographer should have said what I said.
Everyone involved in this shares the blame.
He's a pro who was denied access to the lighting and was unprepared for it. He should have known that the PR hacks were in control. I suspect he was a good portrait photographer who was attending a press call and failed to control the lighting. In or two pics, it just looks like he had vision problems. His pose of the athlete Demus is the most unflattering possible.
The lesson for everybody here, is BE PREPARED for any lighting situation.
He's a pro who was denied access to the lighting and was unprepared for it. He should have known that the PR hacks were in control. I suspect he was a good portrait photographer who was attending a press call and failed to control the lighting. In or two pics, it just looks like he had vision problems. His pose of the athlete Demus is the most unflattering possible.
The lesson for everybody here, is BE PREPARED for any lighting situation.
He was shooting digital, not film. He knew EXACTLY what the lighting was like.
Actually no he didnt. The lighting was being controlled by PR hacks.
This is fairly standard and his mistake was not being prepared for it.
This is why I suggested he might have been a portrait, not a press photographer, because pap's would have known that the lighting would be uncontrollable.
I feel sorry for him. I've had similar experience with the music industry, being primarily a studio photographer, but being asked to take pics and the situation not being what was described prior.
Nevertheless he screwed up, should have been prepared.
He's a pro who was denied access to the lighting and was unprepared for it. He should have known that the PR hacks were in control. I suspect he was a good portrait photographer who was attending a press call and failed to control the lighting. In or two pics, it just looks like he had vision problems. His pose of the athlete Demus is the most unflattering possible.
The lesson for everybody here, is BE PREPARED for any lighting situation.
Even if the lighting was a 'surprise' to him - what about the dreadful composition?
DareImagesArt
Posts: 48
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Not worth publishing and the photographer(s) should be embarassed to actually have them published. And remember that you would usually only publish your very best from a shoot. What a bunch of garbage!!!!
I will go on the assumption that his photos were going to be used, no matter what they looked like (since we are seeing them, that seems to have been the case...
And if he had no control over lighting, set, etc., this would have been a great time to break out some Delta 3200 b/w film.
Low lighting? No problem.
Need dramatic, contrasty pics? No problem.
I am NOT saying any of this as a knock on digital work, I am saying that this is what I (as a film shooter) would have done. Whenever I plan on shooting indoors, I have some 3200 in my bag just in case.
And looking at what he did here, converting to b/w may have helped. Now I know that sports pics are usually always in color, but they are usually pretty good too...
(and I seem to remember seeing a portfolio of sports portraits a few years ago from a guy who did them all in b/w and they were pretty unique).
Sita Mae
Posts: 19,753
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US
There are interesting links and articles in the original thread I linked to. One includes BTS shots that demonstrate that each photographer had 10'x12', their own controlled lighting, and no more than three to four minutes with each athlete. Sounds like a pretty crazy scene.
It's not just the Olympics. Flip through Vogue or Vanity Fair and many ads are taking on the...erm..."snapshot" look.
...not naming names *cough* Marc Jacobs Example *cough*
In Balance Photography wrote: If the intention of the photographer was to show that these athletes are regular people, and just like regular people, they get their photograph taken by some family member that just unboxed their very first camera, I think he succeeded wildly.
Jesus, back off a little. The guy is not an experienced studio shooter. He shot at a media event, and wasn't specifically hired for portraits.
If you've never shot in a style, you wouldn't expect to be an expert at it. The pictures probably shouldn't have been used, but lay off the vitriol.
I don't think that any ridicule of this piss-poor effort of his deserves to be backed-off at all. For starters, you don't factually know whether or not he is an experienced studio photographer or not. Just because he specializes in sports, events, or candids doesn't mean he doesn't know how to shoot in a studio. I shoot in studio very infrequently, but at least I know how to light a subject.
But that aside, I really do think these photos were deliberately shot this way as part of an artistic statement. You can't tell me that anyone with photographic experience better than the bacteria living in the gum on the bottom of my shoe would have composed the shots that poorly. You've got HORRIBLE poses, shots outside the paper showing, etc. I can assure you, if I had seen any photos in my camera look like those, they would have been deleted at the scene, not published for the world to see.
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