For aspiring sports photographers, photographing an Olympic 100m Final may be a dream assignment. Every four years the best sports photographers in the world will cram in to a photo pit and go head to head. It is a sport in its own right, with each photographer competing to get the defining image that the world will see.
In ‘‘One Shot’ Photographing the Olympic Games’ - we are offered insight in what it is like to photograph the world’s biggest sporting event. The 10min documentary shows the huge logistical scale of co-ordinating photographic coverage of the Olympic games. Featuring Lucy Nicholson (Reuters), Bob Martin (Sports Illustrated/SilverHub), Tsuyoshi Matsumoto (Yomiuri Shimbun), Tim De Waele (Freelance), Denis Paquin (Associated Press) and Ken Mainardis (Getty Images) we get a behind the scenes look at last years Rio Olympics.
“We have clients all over the world, so we will cover every single runner, in every single race, in the Olympics. It’s our role to make sure those people get coverage for their newspapers”
Lucy Nicholson, Reuters
The demand for images is huge. During the London 2012 Olympic Games, 7200 pages of Olympic news were publish in newspapers over just a 3 week period. Whilst the Olympics may last just a few weeks, the right photo of a moment in sporting history can last a lifetime.
“One of the things I task my photographers with is to look beyond the field of play and look for that special photo that other people aren’t seeing, and usually those are the photos that have a lot of impact after the games”
Denis Paquin, Associated Press
Preperation
The documentary delves in to the planning and preparation that goes in to photographing each event; there is much more to it than setting a camera to continuous and firing away. Most photographers will have an idea of the image they want to capture before they even set foot in the stadium. Photographers can arrive up to nine hours before the Men’s 100m Final, to photograph a race that lasts less than 10secs. Images taken can be edited and up online within 1min of the end of the race.
“The funny thing about Olympic Games is that we must have sense of place in our pictures. The pictures must either feature the city in question or they must feature the ‘look’ of the games. You need [Olympic] rings in your picture, you need the word marks ‘Rio 2016’ or ‘London 2012’ featuring in the picture in an aesthetic way. If it’s overpowering, it’s no good. If it’s too insignificant, it’s no good. It must be placed it the background gently, so that it compliments the picture aesthetically”
Bob Martin, Sports Illustrated/SilverHub
Whether you have dreamt of photographing the Olympic Games, or just want some insight in to the world of the professional photographer, ‘One Shot’ Photographing the Olympic Games’ is worth 10mins of your time.
Watch above or on YouTube
