August 28, 2004

• Athens 2004 Olympic Images Selection

  OLYMPIC IMAGES SELECTION

  

  I'm finally getting some of the promised images into the Xanga. I'm sort of upset that I didn't snap some shots of a lot of the first week's events, but did get some interesting effects here. All the images were captured in the camera from the video feed and not the S-VHS cable because the cable in the Tivo right now has a  broken tab, and I couldn't get the cable from the camera into the S-VHS connector on the Tivo itself, so the resolution isn't as good as it could be.

  JUSTIN GATLIN:100 METERS GOLD

  The first "image" is from track and field. This is the Olympic Champion Justin Gatlin, who ran and won the 100 meter "dash" for the American Team in the Olympics this past week in Athens, Greece. He proved stronger than Maurice Green, also on the U.S. team, previous gold medal winner, and the favorite to win this year. I caught the images from the NBC coverage of the Olympics recorded from the Tivo machine into the computer via my Sony video camera.   Click here for the full size image of Justin.

  COURTNEY KUPETS: UNEVEN BARS BRONZE

  The second picture is of Courtney Kupets, who won the Bronze medal in the Women's Uneven Bars competition. She and Carly Patterson were my favorite female gymnast performers at this year's Olympics.   

   I promised I was going to present a complete series of these Olympics pictures, and I did compile a bunch of images from the Tivo'd coverage of the Olympics from the past few days, but I must admit, there are not that great a series of "revelations" here, and the photos are sort of run of the mill. Well, this is what I have so far, and it's now past 9pm so I'll post what I have, and that's that I had some great plans for this series, but the images aren't as "snazzy" as I figured they would be. Because of the standard quality, I am not obsessing over the fact that I didn't really dive into this art project as I originally intended. These are not the greatest images in the Xangasphere, not to mention the Olympics database.

  I can't even get the images to display so you can click on them and get the full size image, so since  I don't seem to know what I'm doing, I will present them a little larger here. for your perusing. (Just too lazy to hit the "edit HTML" button right now.) Click here for the full size image of Courtney.

  MISTY MAY AND KERRI WALSH: BEACH VOLLEYBALL GOLD

  The Gold Medal for Beach Volleyball went to more Americans, Misty May and Kerri Walsh, who really got into a celebratory mood after the event ended, and fell into what looked like a lesbian love tussle on the sand prior to their victory cheers. Yes, I do notice that so far, all the images are of American winners, but the Americans have won most of the medals in this year's Olympics, and NBC has always (for the third straight time) favored the American coverage. This reminds me of the 1996 Olympics, the first year NBC carried the program on television, after decades on ABC, when it was still a sporting event, anchored by Jim McKay. I took a vacation to visit my now deceased friend Dan in Toronto, Canada, during the 96 Olympics, and had the pleasure of watching the CBC coverage of most of the games. Canadian coverage is not as jingoistic as NBC's, and a larger mix of nationalites were spotlighted, although of course Canadians were somewhat featured, but not to the extent that Americans are featured on NBC.  Click here for the full size image.

  (Since I'm making the images rather large, I have to make sure I have at least two lines of text between any two images when the browser window is extended to it's full length on the 1152x864 resolution, or the images will overlap the text in some instances. That's why this paragraph is here in parentheses.  )

  FANI HALKIA: 400M HURDLES GOLD

  "Hometown" athlete Fani Halkia, from Greece, won the Women's 400 meter hurdles competition. In order to get just the "right" image, I took about 25 stills from the race, and the aftermath, when Fani draped herself with the Greek flag for the victory lap. Since she was moving, and the image is from a television feed she is moving, and it was difficult to find the right shot that was completely in focus. I do like her smile to the crowd, and think this gets the spirit of the win correctly.

   

  I'm posting these in the same place that I started last night instead of creating a new post for each photo composite, which now that I think of it is probably the better way of presenting them, since I could present the full size images. The image to the left, of Fani, for instance, is full size here.

  • 12:11 am
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