I had to rush back and pack last night after the men's finals.  There was nothing ground-breaking and given that I'm covering the U.S.A.'s basketball game immediately followed by the closing ceremonies tonight, I thought it best to pack every piece of gear and clothing that I could, so that I wouldn't need to rush that before running off to the airport in 14 hours. (Quick tip—the single best thing I did in packing for these Olympics was to use a point and shoot camera to take a picture of the inside of every bag and case that I packed on the way in, and print out an 8X10 color copy of each picture and tape it to the inside of the case before I left... this saved me so much time in packing everything up... no more guessing which lens goes in what case, etc...) 

I'm now on the floor of the bronze medal basketball match between Lithuania and Argentina—there's less than 34 seconds left as I type and you could hear a pin drop in this stadium.... ZERO energy here right now. hope that changes for the U.S.A. game... 

Here are a few more images from last night. The first two are of China's Liang Huo who was the Olympic favorite in the men's 10M diving final. He came in fourth, behind Australia's Matthew Mitcham in a stunning upset that prevented the Chinese from a gold sweep in diving. Given that I've shot diving from the overhead position, beneath the surface through a window, and from almost every possible side angle, I decided to take my last tilt-shift of the games, as well as to play with pans shot between 1/8th and 1/15th of a second.

Photograph by Vincent Laforet for NEWSWEEK