Volvo Ocean Race snaps up top race photographers

Alicante, Spain – June 28 – The Volvo Ocean Race has appointed two photographers with a wealth of sailing experience and knowhow to cover the 2011-12 race, starting in Alicante in October.

New Zealander Paul Todd is a former professional sailor with over 20 years in the photographic industry. Paul served as picture manager during the 2005-06 edition of the race and has worked for several Volvo Ocean Race teams.

“I grew up on boats and have been sailing all my life. When you grow up with a sport you have a passion for it, a feel for it,” Todd said. “When I’m shooting I can see why the crew are doing what they’re doing and anticipate what’s going to happen next. That can lead to great shots – pictures that a non-specialist maybe wouldn’t get.”

Todd has also covered five America’s Cups, shooting for commercial clients, and most recently was the official photographer for the WSTA/Louis Vuitton Trophy. He has published several books dedicated to race photography in Europe and North America. He currently lives in Alicante.

Ian Roman, one of the UK’s leading marine photographers, used to race dinghies and swapped a job in finance in the City of London for a life shooting international regattas. He covered the 32^nd America’s Cup and during the latter stages of the race took on the role of official photographer for Britain’s TEAMORIGIN.

In 2008 he started working for the AUDI MedCup as official photographer, a position he has held ever since. Throughout this busy schedule he has found time to cover events such as the World Match Racing Tour, the 33^rd America’s Cup, The St Barth’s Bucket and the Extreme 40 series.

“I raced dinghies in multiple world championships but after a while I found myself wanting to be out there shooting more and racing less,” said Roman. “Like Paul, I just have a passion for the sport and that passion brings understanding of the sport that can make all the difference.”

The Volvo Ocean Race, the sport’s premier monohull offshore race, is a grueling test of skill, strength and endurance, covering almost 40,000 nautical miles over nine months of racing.

After starting in Alicante on October 29 it concludes in early July in Galway, Ireland after taking in eight other ports in four continents.

From the title you might be expecting me to start whinging on about what a tough job I have trying to photograph racing boats as they dart around the ocean, but you would be wrong.

I’m not sure if this weeks blog is a blog or a thank you.

I have for a long time wanted to incorporate a blog into my website and at the same time have the flexibility to add pages with video’s or text information. I am a big fan of using Twitter and Facebook, both are great platforms for getting a short message across but not really suitable when the message is  500 words or more.

Photoshelter hosts my site and they do a fantastic job, the company is incredibly pro active, they are always improving the site and constantly hosting webinars and distributing quality information to help photographers with their work.

One area that isn’t covered in a standard package is the ability to host a blog, but Photoshelter have addressed this by teaming up with WordPress and together they offer some great functionality. There is only one small problem, I loved the look and feel of my old site and didn’t want any of the standard off the shelf templates that WordPress offer.

This is where things got a little complicated, there are some in depth tutorials offered by both WordPress and Photoshelter on how to customise the base templates, but my skill set is photography, and the idea of me undertaking a website integration was well outside my comfort zone.

Photoshelter recommend a number of web designers but they are all based in the US and I wanted someone local who I could meet face to face to discuss my needs. DSM are a local design team who have many years of design experience. What impressed me about the team was that with a relatively short chat where I explained my needs they were able to translate this into a fully functioning design layout, and more than that they had some great suggestions of their own which has made the site function a lot better.

Oh, and did I mention that I had a pretty short time line to get the work done, and they were able to meet that as well.

The first event of the AUDI MedCup held in Cascais Portugal finished earlier this week, it was great to be back working for the event.

I arrived two days before the regatta was scheduled to begin. The day before the event started was high profile from a media perspective. AUDI SAILING TEAM POWERED BY ALL4ONE and AUDI AZZURRA SAILING TEAM were both being christened. The organisers  had pulled out all the stops and we had German model, singer and actress Eva Padberg, actor Jean Reno, (star of Leon and The Big Blue) and Princess Zahra Aga Kahn involved in the ceremony. Apart from the small issue of either Eva Padberg or Princess Zahra Aga Kahn being able to smash the champagne bottles over the boats (and one of the bottles dropping in the water and sinking) the whole proceedings went off without a hitch.

I am back working for the AUDI MedCup, this will be my fourth year with the organisation and during this time the TP52s have become faster and more exciting every season.

The demands for imagery have become higher, we are delivering larger image files quicker than we ever have done before, and having been to every location at least once (and for some venues this will be my fourth time) finding a new view point to shoot from can be a challenge.

On the odd days when I am looking for inspiration I think about the opening credits of the Simpsons, if Matt Groening and his team can come up a different phrase for Bart to write on the chalkboard at the beginning of every episode then I should be able to find just as many ways to shoot the regatta!

This year there are a number of new team at the event, Nikklas Zennstrom’s Ran, complete with a golden keel, and Tony Langley’s Gladiator (ex Artemis). Alberto Roemmers is back with a new boat and a new name, Audi Azzurra Sailing Team (Alberto’s previous TP52’s have all been called Matador).

On Monday there will be official boat christenings for Audi Azzurra Sailing Team and Audi Sailing Team powered by All4One. Shall I go for the smashing bottle shot, or is it too much of a cliché?

I have made a number of changes from last season, I have started tweeting and I have redesigned my website so that it now has an integral blog (kind of obvious because you are reading this!), much more information on the home page, and is generally much more flexible.

Unless you are a photographer and a bit geeky you might want to stop reading now…

I have also made some workflow changes, the changes are all on the editing side, starting with a new 15” MacBook Pro 8Gb memory with a 500Gb 7200rpm hard drive, (the two year old 4Gb memory version could just not keep up!) I have attached two Lacie 2Tb external hard drives for image storage and backup.

This year I am editing with Lightroom (LR), but as LR is slow to ingest (see earlier blog) I am ingesting with Photo Mechanic (PM) and only importing my picks into LR. I will also be using PM to input all my Metadata.

I have bought a Wacom Intuos4 pen tablet. I have found the pen to be the easiest way to make adjustments to the LR settings, and the extra benefit of the tablet is the ability to customise the keys on the side of the tablet, which can make rating images in PM and cropping images in LR a single keystroke process.

Enough of the geeky stuff, I will be reporting back soon on how everything went.

Earlier this year a very good college friend of mine phoned me up and asked if I would shoot his daughters 18th birthday party.

I was a little taken by surprise, as a photographer specialising in event and commercial work, this was going to be a departure from a normal day in the office. I immediately said yes. Whenever I am asked to do work outside my regular activities it is always interesting and if possible I always like to try and broaden my scope of work.

My attitude is in part shaped by a chance conversation I had with a cab driver in London a few years ago. I was late for a meeting, hailed a cab and jumped in for a journey that was little more than half a mile. London cabbies can be a funny bunch and if the fare is less than £10 then they can be particularly grumpy. This journey was going to be a lot less than £10, I immediately started to apologise. My driver would have nothing of it, he told me he was happy to take me the short journey, his reason being that where he dropped me off there would be fresh opportunities for him that might be better than where he picked me up. I loved his attitude, and I try professionally to be as open minded when I am presented with new opportunities.

Getting back to the 18th party.

As with most things I find preparation to be the key to success, I arrived at the venue around an hour before the first guests were due to arrive, There were three main areas, a restaurant, a bar/dance floor and a seating area. I was able to rearrange the seating to form a studio area, it was a perfect space, close to the entrance so all the guests had to walk past, but not a walkthrough so neither I, nor my gear should knocked over.

I wanted to keep things simple so I brought with me a 1m square Elinchrom softbox powered by an Elinchrom Ranger RX Quadra flash head. The 1m softbox gives a beautiful even light, and the Ranger RX Quadra system is fast, powerful and lightweight. Normally I would use a stand alone fill light or at least a reflector of some description, but with a large number of partygoers I didn’t want too many things to trip over. When I did my initial tests I found that I was getting quite a significant drop off of light in the far right of the shot, I rectified this by camera mounting my Canon Speedlight 580 EXII, setting it to manual, and directing it at 45degrees, directly towards the shadows.

I had everything organised well before the first guest walked through the door. As the guests arrived this is when my fun began. When I work at a sporting event I am frequently asked to shoot portrait shots, for me this is something I enjoy, but time is short, the competitors are primarily there to race and having their photograph taken is low on their list of priorities. I have a couple of minutes at most to take the shots and my sitters mind is sometimes not focused on the task in hand. Here at the 18th was a completely different situation, the guests had got dressed up, looked great and wanted nothing more than to be photographed again and again. What a breath of fresh air.

As well as the staged entrance shots I was also keen to capture the atmosphere of the party, this presented its own challenges, the light was very, very low, but my trusty Canon 1D MkIV and 70-200 2.8 II lens came into their own, with the iso cranked up to an aggressive 8000 I was able to capture some fantastically candid shots with a pleasingly narrow depth of field.

By 10.30 my work was done, everyone was dancing and I had got all the shots I needed. The following day was busy I had taken around 800 images, reducing the number to a more manageable 250 and editing each one took all day. My Lightroom editing package did a fantastic job, the ability to copy and paste a comprehensive set of adjustments saves an enormous amount of time.

All that remained was to upload the edited shots to my Photoshelter powered website for final delivery -another job that Lightroom excels at. Another very enjoyable job finished.

Revisiting my blog from last week where I was raving about Twitter, I was interested to read an interview with Piers Morgan in this weekends FT, when asked if he still gets British papers in the morning, his reply, “I’ve just stopped… Twitter’s become my number one news source.”

St Barths, St Barths Bucket Regatta, 28th March 2009, Race 2, Maltese Falcon, 289

I am writing todays blog because I have recently started using Twitter, and I think it is exceptional, and if you haven’t tried it then I would like you to give it a go. Let me try and explain why.

If you are reading this you probably know I am a photographer specialising in commercial and event photography, Some of the things I am passionate about are photography, all aspects of sailing, branding, Chelsea FC and the Olympics. I can follow all of these from my Twitter feed.

As you can see I have varied interests, I don’t expect anyone is interested in exactly the same things as I am, and that is the beauty of Twitter, I have controlled the content to match my interests.

The news items, (or tweets as they are known) are displayed chronologically, and being only 140 characters long are refreshingly succinct. If I find one of the people I am following does not interest me I simply click the unfollow button and that feed is gone. Imagine if you had such flexibility with all news sites.

There is some jargon that maybe off putting to the new user, mostly abbreviations, and the @ and # symbols. Firstly the @ symbol, ie @ianroman, the @ defines that ianroman is a name. Often you will see RT @username, this is when a user has seen content that has come from one of the people he is following and decided to “Re Tweet”.

You can send a message to somebody by typing @username, but do note that the message you send can be seen by all your followers, it isn’t private.

Then the “#” or hashtag as it is know, the # before a word or a string of letters indicates that what follows is a keyword, and is used to find who is writing about a given subject, for example #travel or #exss, (where exss stands for “EXtreme Sailing Series”), by using this convention, many people will add (for example) #photography at the end of a post about photography, so that others with a similar interest may find the post.

I don’t want this to be a long post I want you to go onto the Twitter site and give it a go.

You can see my details at https://twitter.com/#!/ianroman

Good luck, and let me know if you have and questions.

FRANCE, Marseille, AUDI MedCup, 18th June 2010, Marseille Trophy, Coastal Race, TP52 Audi A1 Powered by All4one.

It seems that taking a photograph is only a small part of a photographers job. As a sports/event photographer I find that deadlines are getting shorter, and the brief is getting longer. The dilemma is how to take a shot and deliver it as quickly as possible back to the Picture Desk. Traditionally returning back to base with a compact flash card has been the preferred solution. I think there are now a number of easier and faster ways around this.

I am always on the look out for new technology that is going to make my life and the people I work for easier. ShutterSnitch is an iPad application which looks like a photographers dream. My current thinking is to combine the Eye-Fi Pro X2 8GB with the ShutterSnitch and a 3G Wi-Fi hub. I shoot with a Canon 1D MkIV which has the advantage of having dual card slots so I will be able to record low res jpeg files on the Eye-Fi SD card and use the CompactFlash cards to record the raw data.

I’m Sure there are other solutions, and if you have a better one I would love to hear from you.

England, Emsworth, The Boat Project. 25 February 2011. A team from the National Trust make a donation to The Boat Project.

During a chance meeting with Mark Covell on the Guinness Stand at the London Boat Show I became aware of The Boat Project. The Boat Project is part of Artists Taking the Lead, a series of 12 public art commissions across the UK to celebrate the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. You can read all about it on their website.

I was interested to find out more about the project and the boat, and agreed to meet with Mark, the Technical Manager of the Project, Gwen Van Spijk, the project’s executive director, and Greg Whelan, one of two Artistic Directors of Lone Twin, the company running the project.

Tucked away in a small shed in Emsworth Mark runs a very well ordered operation, the boat is being laid up in the middle of the shed, but it is over to one side where the magic resides. The donated wood is of all shapes and sizes, the only common denominator is the small numbered label that has been fixed to each item to enable cataloguing. Ask any of the team about the donations and their eyes light up, and they begin to recount stories of evacuation from China, childhood possessions, old lock gates, trinkets. the list goes on.

Throughout the morning many people came to donate their wood, each one with something totally unique, and an accompanying tale to go with it. Everything was photographed, recorded and catalogued.

The Boat Project is one of the most interesting artistic projects I have ever seen. I would recommend a visit.