Bad Olympic pictures

[Greg McCary]

I must admit. There pretty bad. What was this guy thinking?
Bad Olympic photos: How terrible shots of Olympians went viral. - Slate Magazine

[wfooshee]

I wanted to post these, but it would be my luck that he's on the board.

OTOH, so what if he is. He surely needs to be trounced by them what knows!

Here's a site from ABC news with a slide show of many more of the images.

From the article linked in the first post, this wasn't the athletes coming to his studio, it was him attending a photo day with about 25,000 other photographers, and getting his 60 seconds with each athlete. "Here, do this, hold this, look that way, smile, don't smile, NEXT!!!!!!"

In other words, he was not in control, either of the subjects or his environment, and it appears he tried way to hard to put way to much into way too little, and was out of his element. Any of us could take better pictures, but I don't know if I could have handled that day at that time. I like a little time to think!

But those (few) who are defending it as an intentional statement of form are morons. (In my opinion.)

[Frog]

As amateur as I am, I can see those are pretty bad...ok...really bad.

Its not only in photography. I suppose these are suppsed to be dramatic and certain lighting directors on a summer show about american talent seem to believe that the show is about their lighing effects to the point you can't even see what the talents are doing.

[mjs1973]

The image of the badminton player looking threw his racquet made me literally laugh out loud.

[Greg McCary]

Maybe the check bounced and it was done on purpose. It looks to me like no post work was done at all. They look more to me like very bad out takes. I can't imagine these even being released.

[MotorToad]

Like wsmellyfooshee said, it's been mentioned that he was short on time with each athlete. I've also seen (and it sure looks to be true) that he was pretty drastically under-equipped. I think it'd be a tiny bit nearing the appearance of possible hypocrisy if I criticized him for taking a bad shot or twenty, but what I can critique him for is letting them come off his SD card. He'd have been WAY better off eating the cost and letting the shots die a quiet delete rather than release the mother of all "Do Not Hire Me" portfolios.

[Greg McCary]

Like wsmellyfooshee said, it's been mentioned that he was short on time with each athlete. I've also seen (and it sure looks to be true) that he was pretty drastically under-equipped. I think it'd be a tiny bit nearing the appearance of possible hypocrisy if I criticized him for taking a bad shot or twenty, but what I can critique him for is letting them come off his SD card. He'd have been WAY better off eating the cost and letting the shots die a quiet delete rather than release the mother of all "Do Not Hire Me" portfolios.

I read he only had one camera, three lenses, one flash and a laptop, 3 mins with each athelet. But I know some photogs here that could do better than that with Holga and a candlestick.. If you were in his shoes what gear would you have shown up with? But who knows twenty years from now this might be considered brilliant?
I think he should have put them in a time capsule and not released them.

[MotorToad]

Hrm, I guess I should mention that wfooshee is my brother so it's okay for me to be mean to him. Now that I'm in California I have to take the opportunity to make up for all the grief he gave me when he was in high school and I was 5 or 7.

[Tyson L. Sparks]

Wow those were bad, not that I could do netters but they are bad.