Back in 1994, I was a volunteer with the Victoria, BC Commonwealth Games and had the chance to move with those games, and potentially the Olympic Games, as a IT technical support person for media. There is a cohort of technical teams who lead a semi-nomadic life, servicing the various sets of games (Commonwealth, Winter and Summer Olympics) and travelling every two years with each venue. In the end, I did not pursue that opportunity, but it gave me an insight into the environment of the specialist games sports photographer at that time. Since that time, there has been a total revolution in the technologies involved and it has changed even more in the five years since this film was made.
To me, this film was a confirmation of the elements that made Canon produce the kind of camera the R1 is - watching the video, one can see how the digital platform has rapidly changed in the last decade or so, with each games engaging with significant changes in the time within which images need to be on line, how people saw the games and looked at the photographs that were captured.
What each iteration of media technology has done is compress the time within which a photographer works to take the image, transmit it and have it processed, filtered and published on-line down to a matter less than a minute - as they say: essentially as close to real time as possible. One can see how that has placed demands on the Olympic Committee to plan the venues, and the host nation to equip them for the artistic needs of the photographers and the technical demands of transmitting images in real time to very remote locations. It also explains why the specialist sports cameras are biased towards fast focus, high frame rates, smaller MP capacities, and fast, reliable transmission technologies, using both wired and wireless pipelines.
What I also appreciated was the competition among photographers, their influence on the layout of venues and branding styles, and the design of their tools. It's definitely worth the time to watch.
Whether one is interested in the specific tech of the cameras or not, it's an interesting view into the world of the elite sports photographer at the world greatest sporting event.
For those interested, there is a great blog from sports photographer Jeff Cable, who is at the Olympics and gives some good insights into life as a freelance photographer at the games:
Jeff Cable's Blog: Living in a bubble: The crazy things about being a photographer at the Olympics
cheers, TREVOR
The mark of good photographer is not what they hold in their hand, it's what they hold in their head;
"All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow", Leo Tolstoy;
"Skill in photography is acquired by practice and not by purchase" Percy W. Harris
