Making pictures

FTLComm - Regina - Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Ken Jones The 2005 Canada Summer Games are a major event and the City of Regina is working hard to make this a really successful project. As a part of it the games people wanted to have images from the events each day on the web so that people all across the country could see how the games were going. Ken Jones began organised over a year ago a group of volunteer Don Shalley photographers to cover the games. It was just plain good fortune that the Paralympic Championships needed a place and Regina volunteer. Don Shalley took on the responsibility of putting the web presence of the games together on very short notice and realised that pictures of the competition posted online would really make the competition more appreciated across the country. For Ken Jones and his volunteers this was a chance to test drive the whole process and for me it was an opportunity to see what it would be like and test the software and process I would be using to edit the pictures and get them up on a web site.

Timothy Shire The idea for the games was similar and the volume of pictures would be close so for all of us involved the Paralympic Championships would offer us a chance to try things out and put the theory into practice. For me, it meant setting up an office in the van and parking it at Douglas Park so that the photographers could bring their digital cards to me to be downloaded then later, the film based images would arrive at the server site on CD. A couple of things came up immediately. My card reader was an early vintage USB devise and I had to get one that would absorb images much faster for the games. The second discovery was that hard drive space disappears pretty fast with cameras producing five megabyte images. These good photographers were clicking off up to three hundred images a day.

Ken had assembled a truly talented group of photographers:

Phil Frohman   Bill Inglis   Ole Loberg               Robert Phipps   Terry Ritz   David Stearns

Each photographer discovered some really important things about shooting sporting events and it is a certainty that they will be passing on what they learned to the other 34 or so camera folks who will work with them in the Summer Games. Things like depth of field, shutter speed, motion anticipation, all the sort of things that a photographer works on all the time but in a tense event the skills have to be automatic. All of the cameras were high end single reflex lens Nikons, a Canon and a Pentax. In order to edit the huge number of pictures I used the Macintosh iPhoto software to make the selection and minor enhancements. The pictures were then moved to web pages using an interesting piece of FreeWare called "Gallery".

I discovered the discomfort of working in the back seat of the van and during the games will have an office to do the work. It was a remarkable event the athletes were amazing and the competition fierce. The photographers all felt they got more from the event than can be explained and they enjoyed the experience just as I did. Now on to the games.

Timothy W. Shire

Return to Ensign - Return to Saskatchewan News   This page is a story posted on Ensign and/or Saskatchewan News, both of which are daily web sites offering a variety of material from scenic images, political commentary, information and news. These publications are the work of Faster Than Light Communications . If you would like to comment on this story or you wish to contact the editor of these sites please send us email.   Editor : Timothy W. Shire Faster Than Light Communication Box 1776, Tisdale, Saskatchewan, Canada, S0E 1T0 306 873 2004