Lake Louise hosts "Winterstart" each year. The season's first World Cup alpine downhill skiing races is held at what has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth. They come because Lake Louise is cold.

It's beautiful, but it's cold. If it's -20c when you head up the hill in the morning with 50 lbs of cameras on your back it's an average day. The cold means snow making , and they always have enough snow here early in the season to hold the races; take that global warming!

Now downhill skiing is hard not just because you're having to shoot a skier coming at you at over 100 kilometers an hour , but the course they ski is some 3 km long and you need to find a position to shoot the race. You need to think about what the line will be, how the skier will come in and out of your limited focal range. You place your bet, set up your gear and wait for the race. Photographers have to be in position one hour before race time, so now you have to say warm. There are lots of ways to do this, but good ski boots, hand warmers, toe warmers and good gloves are essential. Ask any photographer that works in the cold and they will not have enough fingers on there hand to count all the different type of gloves they have tried.

So your camera is out . Your lens is usually long , meaning over 400mm. The skiers come fast. Safety has become a huge concern of the race organizers so each year we get pushed farther and father away from where we want to be on the course. The 400mm lens turns to a 600mm lens and 600's turn to 800's and now your dealing with F5.6 and very little depth of field. You become a little more blinded in picking up the skier as they come into range the longer the lens. The best pictures usually come from a lip or edge in the snow, that helps separate the skier and his skis and gives the picture depth. It also makes the position more blind as your down below the skier and they just appear on the edge of the lip out of nowhere, and zoom, they are gone. We are able to work around this by knowing when the timing intervals are for each race, if the racers leave the start every 1:15 seconds we can time our watches so we have a better idea of when to put your glove on a frozen lens and a frozen camera to your face. This all goes to hell if they have to make any repairs to the course, or a racer goes down. Then it's back to a waiting game, making sure you don't breath too hard and fog up your viewfinder. I would say most of what I shoot is zone focused, you focus on a location on the course where you think the skier will come through and then hit the button when they do. The new cameras are capable of autofocus, but that means being able to pick up the skier and hold them on target, it works for some positions, but for others it's not the best option.

So you have been standing on the side of a mountain for an hour or more (not counting the time and effort it took to get there) and the race begins. There are more than 60 racers usually, but realistically the winner will come out of the top 40 at 2 minute intervals. That means another 80 minutes trying to stay warm and not miss a single racer, because anyone can win and you need to have the winner.
I filed from my position this year. Using an OQO, our paneikon software an EVDO cell card and the help of Shaun Best to edit from the bureau in Montreal. We had our action from the hill on the wire before anyone else. Andy Cark was at the finish area and Shaun was able to edit him off the snow as well. With all the effort our images made it into Europe to make deadlines from an 1130am race in Western Canada. The men travel down to Colorado for the next week of races and the women arrive here for the start of their downhill season.
Then it's home to California to warm up.

     
I've always thought the music business could learn a good lesson from the photography business. We embraced the digital world and they fought it to the bitter end.
You could buy and download a digital picture years before the music business would allow you the same choice with a song. Pictures were on your computer and your phone  a few trips around the sun  before music was.
That said, as a " Work for Hire" most of us maintain no copyright protection on our work and as a  musician ; write and perform a song that goes to No.1 and you're setting yourself up in a new house a new car and a whole new circle of friends. For a number of years now pictures have been reaching out to the world in a way the music business is only now beginning to understand.

Technology is making real time pictures a global reality.
Last night our crew of  5 Reuter photographers covered the 2008 Grammy Awards held at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. Our field general (global entertainment photo editor Sam Mircovich ) was a scratch at game time after being put on the injured reserve list following a visit to the dentist earlier in the week.

Fred Prouser and Mario Anzuoni took on the task of editing, Lucy Nicholson set up lights in the deadline photo room and handled all the backstage photography, Danny Moloshok shot arrivals and I was inside shooting the pre-show and show. This awards show turns into a 14 hour day very quickly. As in all of our event coverage we
were all connected using Reuters  Panikon software. Danny and were on  OQO computers and EVDO cards from our positions and Lucy just dropping a disk with the editors who were working next to the deadline photo location. Processors were Rick in Colorado , Rich in Portland, Fred in San Diego and Stel on the picture desk in Washington D.C. (Note: Our field general  ,global entertainment photo editor  Sam Mircovich , was a scratch at game time after being put on the injured reserve list following a visit to the dentist earlier in the week

Danny shot arrivals and the images were sent from his position via Panikon and edited by Fred in the deadline room. Mario was editing my images from the show, I was sending from my seat about 150 feet away from the right side of the stage. The sprint EVDO cards were moving thumbs in about 2 seconds and pulls were about a minute on 4 to 5 megs depending on crops, the network was flying.

Fred is very good and finding the show rundown lists. It's a huge help when your inside as once they go live its non-stop for 3 ½ hours and you have to think and plan ahead for what is coming next. As the TV cameras go to HD and get better he light seems to be getting worse. I shot mostly at 1000 ASA some at 160sec some at 200. I would drop down to 800ASA and 125th on the wide pictures. Most everything is shot on a 400 2.8 with a canon Mark 111. The auto white balance on the Mark 111 is junk so I dialed in at around 3600K and it seemed to hold pretty good for the entire show. Oh yes, I should mention the pre show ... we shoot 100 awards before the live to air show begins ..... it's a long day for everybody.