A different Olympic coverage for me

I’m having a great time, even though at times I feel like I’m accomplishing so little. Here are some of the bits and pieces:

CREDENTIALS: We have more people working for us than our space accommodates and we’ve just been chastised for monopolizing the common area of the media center. We don’t have enough “Media” credentials for all of us to work in the area for accredited media, so I have a “Partner” credential, with very limited access. I really miss having a media credential! We’re working on getting more media credentials, but I can make do with what I have.

THIS TIME, IT’S DIFFERENT: This is my third Olympics, which is an incredible thing. In the first two I was a photo editor, working at the sporting venues, editing and transmitting photos back to home base (Gannett for one, Associated Press for the other.) This time, I’m not working from venues. This time, I’m downtown and getting to actually some of the non-sports activities that are happening. Just seeing all the people and how excited they are to be here is so much fun. Just walking two blocks to lunch I found two stories for this project.

Claire, the copper cowgirl

STILL CONFLICTED: I need to get over myself and make the adjustment. But it’s hard. I want my pictures to be good, and having to work with just the wide angle is certainly challenging.

I found Claire, a street performer (known here as buskers) dressed in Western cowgirl gear and covered from head to toe in copper paint. Her gig is to entertain through mime and frozen poses. When you drop a tip in her pail, she comes to life. Great! Good audio of the crowd trying to figure her out, the money dropping in the pail and great movements and expressions from her. But I can’t get as close as I want to. And the iPhone’s camera has a delay to it, so you really have to anticipate movement and hope people don’t move as the picture is actually taken. And in this photo you’ll see the wicked distortion from the Bubo’s lens.

For a loonie or two, you get a tip of the hat from the cowgirl. (A loonie is a Canadian dollar coin.)

Dave Barkwell, the senior vice president for sales and marketing at Vericorder, has been very upfront in our conversations about the limitations of the system. He says for people like me, the advantage is going to be with a backend system that is not yet fully developed. What they envision is the ability to upload your images to the iPhone from a memory card, then import those images into one of the Vericorder apps. That means I could shoot with my DSLR, record audio on my iPhone then integrate the two using the Showcase app. That’s a promising solution.

The copper cowgirl draws a good crowd in downtown Vancouver.

(By the way, since Claire is a mime, I don’t really know anything about her. I don’t even know for sure that her name is Claire. I just know that she was wearing a busker license and that’s the name on the license. I hope she contacts me so I can add more information.)