Thursday, January 21, 2010

US Figure Skating Championship photos

I went to Ice Dancing at the US Figure Skating Championships today. This time I took a better camera. It's still a difficult thing to take pictures of. The ice is bright and yet you have to use high ISO speeds and fast shutter speeds and they don't want you to use flash, not that it woudln't help anyway. You need a lens that gathers a lot of light wich I don't have so the pictures turn out noisy but they tell my story. Anway I loved this girls hair.

Here they are dancing. They ended up 2nd in Juniors.

There was one couple who were dressed up like Holocaust inmates or perhaps Jews during the Nazi occupation. I just finished a book written by a woman my mom knows who is a Holocaust surviver of Dachau. She was living in Kiev Ukraine as an 8 year old when the Nazis invaded. She and her mom were deported to a camp in Poland and then on to Dachau where she barely survived. The book was both heartbreaking and heartwarming. These outfits seemed a little odd to me in this context having just read that book, but this pair was really good. They danced to the theme from Schindler's List.

Here is one final spin to end this post with. If you ever get a chance to see figure skating in person don't pass up the chance. It's really worth it.

6 comments:

Quiet Paths said...

Great action shots, Don. I've never seen these artists live; I'd love to.

don said...

Thanks, it's a great thing to watch live and the Spokane Arena is a good venue so it's really worth the trip over next time it comes to town.

Jules said...

Closest thing I've seen to live ice skating was Ice Capades. Not the same thing!!! Glad you had a great time and even gladder you brought a camera that'd capture these shots!

don said...

Ice Capades is kind of the same thing, although this helped decide who goes to the Olympics for us.

I've never been a big fan of figure skating coverage in the Olympics as it seems to hog the TV time from ski racing. But I did enjoy watching this in person.

I want to watch all of the sports on TV from winter Olympics. Not just hours and hours of figure skating, with a few minutes of the other sports thrown in here and there.

Vixey said...

I used to love watching figure skating as a young girl. Maybe that's because I used to be a figure skater. I was never as good as these people. I never even had an Olympic dream at it. Just more recreational for me but I loved watching it just the same. I've seen some live, not competitions just the showy type stuff but it was still fun to watch.
Tracy Wilson and Rob McCall used to be my favorite. I used to want a skating dress like the one she wore for this routine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHn2ByL_q_c&feature=related. This was my all time favorite program of theirs.

don said...

I used to have skates as a kid. We walked down to a park after school where there was a pond to skate on with lights and a warming hut to change into your skates in. We'd play crack the whip. I can still remember the smell of warming hut inside and how the skates sounded as kids walked on the plywood floor.