Photos of the USA olympic team.

<p>Only a few photographers are allowed to photograph the US olympic team. Any thought on the quality of these photos?<br>

http://solsticevisuals.com/post/26229830602/outrage-over-the-photographs-of-the-united-states</p>

<p>Wow, that's pretty disappointing; I'm surprised any professional photographer would release pictures like that for such an important event. </p>

<p>I'm no professional portrait photographer, but to me they look pretty amateurish (and not in any good sense). I can't really guess at what the photographer was thinking when he took or selected these images. Unless he had some idea in mind that goes over my head or was seriously constrained by where, what and how he could shoot, he seems to have done a pretty poor job.</p>

<p>Maybe they gave him 15 seconds with each athlete and no control of lighting or background?</p>

<p>The German team images aren't much better.</p>

<p>Maybe they are leaked test shots?</p>

<blockquote>

<p>The German team images aren't much better.</p>

</blockquote>

<p> <br>

I agree. Weird that the article seems to say they are. </p>

<p>Here are some additional shots that look more decent but it's unclear who made the pictures: <br>

<a href="http://oddstuffmagazine.com/portraits-of-team-usa-athletes-in-london-2012-olympics.html/1-48">http://oddstuffmagazine.com/portraits-of-team-usa-athletes-in-london-2012-olympics.html/1-48</a></p>

<p>Click the link on the right below the image to advance to the next one. </p>

<p>It looks like his background roll paper was put down over carpet - what a mess. I actually like a couple of the shots (the shot of badminton player Tony Gunawan is one, with one or two more from the full set), but some were very average and most were downright embarrassing.</p>

<p>It's hard for me to believe the USOC wouldn't vet a photographer better before turning him loose to shoot. OTOH, maybe they were trying to cheap out on the fees by not engaging top shooters like Joe McNally, etc.. Maybe they found Klamar on Craigslist and saw that he had a nice camera...after all, that's what makes good pictures, right? </p>

 

<p>Maybe in the tradition of the Olympics being an amateur sporting event, they hired who they thought was a good amateur photographer. </p>

<p>Better to have no photos than those.</p>

<p>It gets worse. Check out <a href="http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/-OQqxxHCjrW/Beckham+is+staying+in+the+USA">these photos, purportedly of David Beckham</a> although it's almost impossible to tell. The photos appear to be 1% crops from somebody's cell phone pix.</p>

<p>Bunch more here that show much better and with attribution to photographers:<br>

<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/picturegalleries/9270482/London-2012-Olympics-portraits-of-Team-USA-athletes.html?frame=2221376">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/picturegalleries/9270482/London-2012-Olympics-portraits-of-Team-USA-athletes.html?frame=2221376</a></p>

<p>Most of those photos - regardless of photographer - look like they were taken by ambitious young freelance PJs who were experienced in spontaneous captures but not in studio portraiture. Joe Klamar, for example, seems to have a knack for good spontaneous captures of sports figures in action.</p>

<p>But every photo in that Olympic athlete section reeks of high concept and poor execution by folks who spent way too much time browsing "Strobist" for shortcuts and not enough time in the studio. I see lots of lighting errors that any genuinely experienced, well rounded PJ would have spotted and corrected before snapping the shutter - or at least after checking the LCD for the test shots.</p>

Come on guys, what professional photographer would release images like that? No photographer in their right mind would. These are

obviously photographs taken by a reputable professional fulfilling a brief! That's what they do with assignments like this. The photo,s

are obviously taken with a view of being handed over to a graphic designer to create something the American people will be proud of.

The photographer would haprobably been told not to worry about certain things and to focus on other things, thus giving the graphic

designers a base to work from.

They would be leaked images for sure. If I am wrong! I hope your team performs better than the images look. ;)

That's my take on it.

<p>If you compare those shots to the shots of the other photographers - you will see a marked difference in quality, execution and composition. </p>

<p>These press events are like organized papparatzi(SP) - photographers each have a station (one of the other photographers actually has a photo of the setup on their page) and each athlete moves from station to station - each photographer getting about 10-15 minutes with each athlete.</p>

<p>The setup, lighting and props are up to each of the photographers. The photographer who did decent work (IMHO) even stated that at one point he blew out two of his 3 lights and was saved by a colleague in town to photograph some other event. So it seems that the USOC basically said to these photographers - you're here, the athletes will be here from this time to that time, and every thing else is up to you.</p>

<p>It seems that this particular photographer was invited because he is good at capturing action shots - which doesn't translate into good studio shooting or shots. From the looks of several images he isn't able to connect to them very well or communicate what emotion or expression he is going for. Add to that that these look like unprocessed out of the camera / not even cropped or anything... and you have a disaster.</p>

<p>Dave</p>

<p> </p>

<p>These photos are from the US Olympic Media Summit, held in May in Dallas. As David Haas said, the point of the Media Summit was to allow a number of media outlets to photograph and interview some of the athletes competing for the Olympic Trials. It worked just as David described. Because my son competes in Acrobatic Gymnastics (not an Olympic sport but under the umbrella of USAG), I've seen sets of images from 2 other photographers, both of which are much better. Our local news even provided some background images to show their setup.</p>

<p>I've wondered about the selection process. I'm assuming that photographers and other media people requested invitations to attend, just as they request credentials for other events. </p>

<p>Truly awful and they were released as is. </p>

<p>Yikes! I am still reeling in shock. Totally uninspiring and lacking in any depth.</p>

<p>I wouldn't be surprised if Joe Klamar's career goes into a tailspin right about now. Google his name and nothing but article after article of flak greets you in the search results. If he even had a website, it has been eclipsed by the bad press he's getting.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>So (God help us) the athletes look like real people. Photos that were not ground out by some shoot-and-retouch-like-hell perfect image factory. If we retouch a 'supermodel' to look like plastic perfection, we get trashed. If we <em>don't </em> do it to Olympians, the same applies?</p>

<p>At dailymail.co.uk, AFP's Director of Photography Mladen Antonov comments on Klamar's photos in this post:</p>

<p>http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2168894/Shoddy-genius-Photographs-taken-U-S-Olympic-team-slammed-disgraceful-wonder-mistakes-deliberate.html</p>

<p>Basically he says that they sent Klamar for "his unconventional view to both photography and the world." He continues, "We have made them look like human beings, not like pieces from Madame Tussaud's like the other agencies did. They are real people, not works of art." The photos were not touched up because AFP is a news agency and they are not official publicity photos for the US team.</p>

<p>I think imperfect backgrounds are a reasonable way to add a feeling of realism and "life" to images of people. However, I think the studio is not a good environment for creating this kind of imperfection as everything is artificial except the subject. To create controlled imperfection using only man-made materials in one minute ... the idea is good but it's not going to be realized very well in such conditions and time pressure. He made an attempt, his employers (somehow) liked the results and they went public with the images. The response ... well, I think it is good that there is a discussion. If there were no discussion, that would be bad. ;-)</p>

<p>I think the photographer has to have fairly good self confidence to publish something like this :-) </p>

 

<p>I don't know, Ilkka. I mean, why stop at lousy pictures if the objective was to be creative? </p>

<p>Sounds to me more like Klamar is getting <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39YUXIKrOFk">too sexy for his pictures</a> - Right, said Fred. </p>

<p>Michael, if you wanted to be satifical towards the "official" type of polished studio images of atletes, and show them in a more rough way, how would you do it? You have one minute per subject; you do not know who is going to come next into your booth nor do you know in advance what most of them do.</p>

<p>I don't object to the deliberately ironic unstylish approach, including the obviously visible backdrop being too narrow for some photos. Some photos - Klamar's photo of Trey Hardee, and diver Brittany Viola, for example - work very well for me. But his photo of gymnast Gabrielle Douglas simply doesn't work, even in the context of a deliberately or ironically imperfect faux-casual approach. It's just a flawed photo. Most of 'em, like his photo of boxer Joseph Diaz, are just ... meh.</p>

<p>Generally speaking, in the same deliberately unpolished style, Lucas Jackson's photos work pretty well. He seemed to have a better handle on what would and wouldn't work in that style.</p>

<p>I agree with many others. Even after knowing the brief, I think these could have been better executed. It is still possible to show the athletes' vulnerabilities and "humanness" while crafting some great photos, even if the time allocated is short.</p>

<p>Mark, absolutely; the shots are like drafts of ideas as they are. Conditions were against him: one minute per subject, using another photographer's setup and lighting gear. If he had his own booth I am sure the execution would have been more finished, but he was prepared for a news / press event where the athletes would be photographed on stage, not a commercial photo shoot using studio gear, so he was ill equpped and had no choice but to share lighting. A miscommunication regarding the nature of the event resulted in a photographer not properly prepared to handle this unusual event. Nevertheless some photos resulted and the editors decided to run them. Some of these are quite decent even in their unfinished state (watch the slideshow):</p>

<p>http://blogs.afp.com/correspondent/?post/2012/07/05/Pixels-and-piety:-Photographing-Olympic-icons</p>

<p>I also happen to like Klamar's rendition of the archer, Jennifer Nichols, e.g. here:</p>

<p>http://pinterest.com/pin/202873158184492783/</p>

<p>She looks quite sinister in that photo.</p>

<p>However, I must ask this fundamental question: why are news photographers expected to make photos where the athletes are made to look like gods? Here is another photographer's take on the media day:</p>

<p>http://www.uspresswire.com/search/fulltext/jairaj%20summit/page1</p>

<p>Is that what we want news media to run?</p>

<p> </p>

<p>BTW, I personally almost always prefer quite soft light ("wall of light") on people subjects and would not dare to go for a high-contrast approach. However, I also think any deviation from the norm of the photography at that event (which seem to idolize the subjects over the top) has to be a good thing, even if in this case it was partly accidental.</p>