Newsweek’s Picture of the Day: August 15, 2008

Photograph by Vincent Laforet for NEWSWEEK

Today’s choice for Picture of the Day was a tough decision. By a hair’s breadth, I’ve chosen Vincent Laforet’s overhead picture from the weightlifting competition, over Donald Miralle’s action picture from badminton (2nd image down, player in yellow). Full disclosure: The deciding factor was that yesterday’s Picture of the Day was a similar type action photo to Miralle’s, so providing visual variety from yesterday to today was the tie-breaker. In this picture, Laforet has captured a celebration by Andrei Rybakou of Belarus as he broke the world record in the men’s 85kg competition. Shooting straight down on a zoom lens at the 73mm focal length he has created a wonderfully graphic celebration image. Interestingly, I decided to make the crop square, while Vincent saw the picture cropped in two different ways,which you can see on his post. This is an example of how subjective photography can be, with different opinions between photographer, editor, and perhaps, you the reader.

—Simon Barnett, Director of Photography, NEWSWEEK