Remote Heaven or Hell depending on the Results…

September 4th, 2008 in Olympics

Here’s a quick video of the still camera remotes at the Beijing Olympics. I didn’t have time to shoot, blog AND edit video during the games – so I didn’t get a chance to look through and cut this video until now. It shows close to 100 remote cameras – ALL – focused on the finish line of the men’s 100M Final – THE – marquee event of any summer Olympic games (with the exception of Phelps this time around of course.)

(Click on the image above to start the video.)

Photographers showed up as early as 5:30 a.m. – for a 10:30 p.m. race that lasted less than 10 seconds… and as I wrote in a previous blog post – it was a hilarious scene to witness at times… maddening to some who had other photographers “bump” their cameras off target at the last minute… and these were often photographers showing up “late” (late being 4-5 hours prior to the race) bumping the photographers’ cameras that had been set up 17 hours prior to the race…. Bill Frakes of Sports Illustrated had 17 of his remote cameras set up for the race alone… and he shot #18 handheld of course. Nuts!

This is quite a site – even for professional photographers (you’ll see a quick shot of photographers taking photographs OF the cameras midway through the video…) I love the little Canon G9 used to shoot this – perfect little camera to have on you at all times.

When you think of it, you’re looking at close to $1 million worth of camera gear used for remotes alone when you add the lenses, Pocket Wizards, cords and mounts in this video… All to get that “one” great shot… enjoy!

N.B.: You will need to have Apple’s free Quicktime plugin installed on your browser to see this video on either a Mac or PC. If you’re still having trouble – you can also see a lower quality version of this video on YouTube at the link here.