Winter Olympics: Seeking creativity as skaters go in circles

Dan Powers, a photographer with The Post-Crescent and USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin, is covering the Winter Olympics as part of the USA TODAY Sports Images team in Pyeongchang, South Korea. He is writing periodic columns on his experiences at the Games and sharing some of his photos.

PYEONGCHANG, South Korea - When asked about the Olympics, I think most people would say it consists of action-packed events full of history-making moments and emotions that are off the charts.

For the most part, I would agree. But on occasion, there are stretches of monotony.

Every sport has its moments of high-octane excitement, but some are more geared for that than others. Figure skating? Oh yeah, tons of moments. And for action, you always have sports like snowboarding or hockey. But as a photographer, some sports require a little more digging down to come up with interesting images.

Tonight, I photographed long track speed skating. The men’s 1,500 to be exact. Two competitors race at the same time but they aren’t competing one on one; they're looking to get the best time overall among all of the competitors. Visually it’s a pretty straight forward scenario … they’re just doing laps.

The problem? Coming up with a variety of photos. Especially emotional moments because the winner might not actually be on the ice when they find out they’ve won. That would only happen if they are in the last pairing.

If it’s obvious a skater got a spectacular time, they most likely would react shortly after crossing the finish line. We’ll have two photographers each night that will take turns looking for the emotions in that spot at the end of each race.

Because there were a fair amount of races tonight before the United States participated, I had time to try some artistic photo techniques. The main one is called panning. That is when you use a slow shutter speed and lateral movement of the camera to give the image a sense of motion. It sort of gives the image a swirly painting effect. The tough part is keeping part of the image sharp and the rest full of motion. Success increases with attempts. Lots of attempts.

I only use this technique after I’ve made sure I have numerous sharp images of my main subject. Once I have that, I can play around. And with three straight days of speed skating, I’m going to try all the techniques I can think of.

Next up for me are the short races that are only 1,000 meters. So, I’ll stick to the basics and concentrate on getting traditional images. But Friday is a whole different ball game. Each race is 10,000 meters. Wish me luck coming up with something fresh.