Photographers Blog

Ice marathon

Heinz-Peter Bader

Jan 30, 2012 15:56 EST

By Heinz-Peter Bader

The Alternatieve Elfstedentocht (Alternative 11-City Race) has been a Dutch tradition since 1974. The original version in Friesland, an ice skating race over 200 km (124 miles) through 11 towns linked by canals, rivers and lakes, dates back many centuries. As the local waters don’t freeze over so easily anymore, the Dutch started looking for alternatives in other countries and organized an Alternatieve Elfstedentocht at lake Weissensee in Austria’s Carinthia Province in 1989 for the first time.

Nowadays the Alternatieve Elfstedentocht Weissensee is a two-week event with some 6,000 participants, mostly Dutch amateur speed skaters. A day before one of the 200 km races I went to shoot an event officially called the Frisian Shorttrack Championships, with athletes wearing traditional wooden skates and clothes, which turned out to be a fun race. Some 30 women, men and a boy competed in several knock-out races over 110 meters (yards) each, drinking traditional liquor between the heats, struggling more with their clothes than with the ice sometimes.

On the way to the competition I met Norbert Jank, the ice keeper of lake Weissensee, responsible for the preparation of the tracks and the one person to decide if the lake is frozen well enough for the event to take place. Well… it was. Mr. Jank took me out to the middle of the lake by car, grabbed his power saw and began carving deep into the ice. The piece he cut out was an impressive block some 40cm high (15 inches) – the thickness of the ice. It was not enough that Mr. Jank was proud of “his” ice, he wanted to demonstrate the lake’s drinking water quality, so he kneeled down and drank right out of the lake.

Crashed ice: A woman’s sport

At the beginning of January, staff at Reuters and I had a discussion about creating a multimedia piece on the Red Bull Crashed Ice race, an event where competitors have to skate down an urban ice course in the middle of Old Quebec. After some discussion, the idea of doing a multimedia piece on the introduction of the woman’s category at the event was suggested, which I thought was a great idea.

On race day, the temperature was slightly below -30 Celsius in Quebec City, which is not unusual for that time of the year. One of my colleagues had the grease in his lens’ zoom barrel freeze during the race, so I had to be careful and keep my cameras, voice recorder and video camera warm.

It was my first time shooting pictures, videos and collecting audio to do a multimedia piece. My plan of attack was to shoot my pictures first and then film the videos. It’s always a good thing to have a plan when you’re out of your comfort zone. When I felt confident I had good pictures for the wire, I decided to switch to my video camera to shoot short video clips. This event was well suited for pictures and videos since there was more than thirty heats of four competitors. As always, if you’re filming video and something important happens, you will not be able to get the still image that the other agencies might have. I think photographers have to be careful not to spend too much time shooting video and concentrate on their primary job — taking pictures. Fortunately for me, nothing happened while I was capturing my video clips.

Collecting the audio was probably the easiest part of my job. I managed to do my interviews the day before the race. I prepared my questions in advance and asked some friends and colleagues to have a look at them to be sure I was not off track. As for the ambient sound, that was even easier. The race was divided into heats and between them people were screaming. While I was waiting for the next one, I just had to push the record button to collect some sound.

Multimedia is the way of the future for our profession, so being versatile will give you an edge over the competition. But not every event allows you to do good multimedia. You have to think of your core clients first. Will be well served if you drop your camera for a couple of minutes to concentrate more on shooting video and audio? In the end, I like the result of the piece that our editors put together, but I think I still have a lot of room for improvement. Perhaps, the next time it will be easier. I’m sure I’ll find new techniques to do more than one thing at once.