Orange Bowl Swim Classic_2011

On January 4th our local pool hosted the 8th annual Orange Bowl Classic swim meet. This is the 8th time I've photographed the event, and the challenge is always how to get quality coverage that our PR guru, Andy Newman, can use to get the story out on the wire services yet do it differently than I've done in the past.

This year automatically presented some new opportunities because it ran in the afternoon, whereas I had always shot it in morning light previously. That changed which side of the pool I shot from and therefore the backgrounds were different.

From a technical challenge POV, our water clarity is normally stunning at the Jacobs Aquatic Center pool, but bring a couple hundred collegiate swimmers from the Midwest and the Northeast to the Keys in December and you can bet sunblock will be part of their pre-swim protocols. Of course, they slather it on just before jumping in, which is silly anyway, but the filters can't keep up and the water clarity suffers. Therefore, the shots that worked best are those with a very wide lens from very close. Doing so during a competition is difficult, but gratefully the coaches understand that I know enough to keep out of the way (barely).