Dateline: Korea

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Well I’ve made it –  7,295 miles later and I’ve landed in Korea.  Nearly there (Beijing.)  From this point on the blog will evolve a bit – the majority of my posts will now come to live on Newsweek’s Blog site.  I’ll do my best to continue to make a few non-Olympic posts here and there on this site – Tech Tips seem to be quite popular.  That said, there’s absolutely no need to stop checking this blog – I’ll make sure to put the first paragraph of every blog post here on a daily basis – and a link will then forward you onto the Newsweek site so that you may see the remainder of the post and photographs.

So if you’re subscribing to this blog via RSS, e-mail, or you have it in your bookmarks – there’s no need to change anything.   Just sit back and know that you can start here every day and then read the full posts from Beijing that will be posted to the Newsweek site.  That’s only fair – after all they are the ones paying me to blog and take pictures for them and sending me half-way across the world.   

I must give a major nod to Newsweek and DOP Simon Barnett for making blogging as much of a priority as our making of photographs during these games.  I truly think this is the wave of the future for photography – and it’s very forward-looking of them.   I think readers will be bombarded with imagery from Beijing – and our challenge will be to engage them (and you) with some unique stories that surround those images.  I’m truly very excited about this.   Because of this new element of blogging – this is probably the most excited I’ve ever been, going into an Olympics.

As far as my trip out here, the flight went quite well.   I was lucky enough to get on the upper deck of the Boeing 747-400 with 298 other passengers on this marathon flight (only 30 seats were empty one of the Captains told me – they have more than one on these long flights.)   The service on Korean air was excellent – I highly recommend it. Food was the best I’ve had – well probably ever – on an airplane.  The even had a documentary on the Magnum agency, called “The Magnum Story” as one of the short series on the on demand TV – nice! (If you can find it – I recommend watching it for sure!  

I was able to fly business class – no middle seat for me in the back this time.  And if you’re wondering – no, neither Newsweek nor any magazine these days will fly most of us in anything other than an economy seat these days – the budgets as you know, wouldn’t allow for it.   That’s where all of my credit card miles came in to use for me – I don’t need a new flat screen TV or a clock radio thank you Mastercard…  Instead I chose to fly to the Olympics in Business class… priceless…. well actually, I had to cash in a whopping 244,000 miles – yes that’s the correct number of zeros – to get this business class seat almost one year ago.   Worth every single mile if you ask me.

So today and tomorrow might be a little quieter on the blog front, but expect at least one post for sure,  as we all prepare for the Games – but then come Friday we’ll be off to the races!  Hope you’ll join Donald, Mike and myself on our journey through these games, hopefully you’ll enjoy the photographs, and perhaps even some of the stories from behind the scenes.  Again – I’ll post a link to the Newsweek blog as soon as it is up.  A bientot!