Sochi Olympics 2014: The tech behind the world’s biggest photo shoot

It is easy to take all those awesome sports photographs streaming out of the Winter Olympics in Sochi for granted. The truth is that it requires an amazing amount of technology, coupled with the frenzied energy and dedication of a team of dozens of talented photographers, editors and technicians to make it happen.

Field work: Getting the images

If you think sports photography is just about sitting in a photo pit behind a big lens and a tripod, think again. Nordic ski race photographers, for example, needed to ski the challenging course themselves to find the best photo shots. Then they needed to camp out in their chosen spots for hours at a time as the races unfolded. Fortunately, so far the weather has been balmy so it has been a cushier assignment than in years past.
Other locations, like the bottom of ski jumps, are even less accessible, so remote-control cameras are used. The trick to using a remote to capture action is to learn the effect of the shutter lag — shoot too early and you’ll just get the skier’s head, too late and all you’ll see are the tail ends of their skis. If you’re shooting with the camera in hand it’s pretty simple to check each image and learn how much to anticipate. With a remote you either need to shuttle back and forth checking results, or set up a feed off the cameras’ live view over WiFi or a long cable. That introduces issues with range, reliability, and battery life — not to mention additional complexities if you are controlling several cameras.
TV networks have gone even further than still photographers, placing video cameras on robotic tracks as well as on overhead cables at many of the venues. For the first time ever, a drone is also being used to capture footage. Flying high above the Slopestyle course, it relays live action video down to the big screens near the spectators — who are otherwise too far from most of the action to get a close look.
 

From capture to credit: Moving and processing the photos

Having great images on site at a venue is only the beginning of a photo team’s work. Getty set itself a goal of having edited images with captions ready to send to clients as soon as three minutes after an event finishes. In world-class events with smaller venues, like football playoffs, this can often be accomplished by sending low-resolution JPEG images over WiFi for online usage, and then shuttling the RAW images on flash cards for later use in print. However, the sheer scale of Olympics venues make any type of wireless network impractical.