Remember those jolly tourist pictures you took of yourself in Italy where you were pretending to prop up the leaning tower of Pisa? Here’s the Beijing equivalent.

You stand in front of the Bird’s Nest stadium, hold up your hand and by a miracle of foreshortening appear to grip the vast cornetto-shaped torch burning on the roof of the athletics venue.

It is the most popular picture for visitors to take, judging by the streams of foreign and Chinese tourists posing with their arms in the air.

Of course, the vast roof-top cauldron is shaped like the Olympic torch used in the pre-Games global relay that was hit by anti-China protests.

There are no signs of unhappiness among the security-screened crowds milling around the stadium. ”Everybody wants to be a torch bearer here,” said Li Jiaheng, 16, who was photographing his mother ”holding” the distant torch.

PHOTOS: Chinese tourists poses for a picture outside the National Stadium, also known as the Bird’s Nest, while pretending to hold the Olympic Torch, August 16, 2008. REUTERS/Christina Hu

Rickey Rogers writes: Alessandro Bianchi created this wonderful image as he searched for a new angle from which to photograph the second day of the fencing competition.

Sports like fencing, boxing and judo are very repetitive for a photographer, and it takes a curious eye to find new angles. The picture is aesthetically pleasing with enough movement to give the reader an idea of what the sport is about, and its multi-layered composition invokes mystery.

The caption reads: Sturia Torkildsen of Norway (back) competes against Matteo Tagliariol of Italy (not pictured) during their epee bout in the men’s individual fencing competition at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, August 10, 2008. REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi

Rickey Rogers is Reuters News Pictures Editor, Latin America. For a selection of other great Reuters pix from the Games click here. For the previous day’s chosen picture click here.

To bring you the stunning choreography of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, Reuters photographers and photo editors do a complex dance of their own — and then a brutal Darwinian whittling down to select just the best and most iconic images to send to subscribers.The team shot a staggering 18,000 frames during the four hours of the ceremony. Only about 850 shots made it to the “wire” — our file of photos to customers. That’s just five percent. Less than a 10th of those were selected for our web slideshow and a typical newspaper subscriber might only print one two or three shots from the selection.

In a brutally competitive world like this, nothing can be left to chance.

One of our most experienced Olympic photographers and editors, Gary Hershorn, attended rehearsals of the opening ceremony in order to plot out key moments that simply had to be captured.

That advanced planning helped the team of 12 photographers in the stadium, nine immediately outside and six in Tiananmen Square and on the Great Wall get ready to tell the story in images through a mixture of bread-and-butter set-up shots and imaginative compositions that matched the dreamy romance of the show itself.

The 12 in the stadium had set positions from the roof catwalk down to the stage and scattered all around the Bird’s Nest. Four were directly cabled into the editors’ computer system (and, in fact, we had two senior editors, including the global head Tom Szlukovenyi, in the stadium itself to do on-the-scene selection of the key shots); the rest sent their computer disks to the editors via runners.The gargantuan task of editing the file was split between the editors in the venue, six editors and 15 processors in the main press centre and a further specialist desk in Paris that selected photographs of VIPs for magazine use.

This type of volume would have been absolutely impossible in the days before digital photography -18,000 prospective shots would have taken some 600 rolls of film, a physical and financial impossibility!

After the dramatic spectacle, the grind of chronicling 204 delegations began. Editors made sure we had shots of the delegation from every place we have clients as well as every place that was somehow newsworthy.

After just a couple of hours sleep, the team regrouped to start the work of capturing the actual sport.

Photo credits: (from top) Mike Blake/Reuters, Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters, David Gray/Reuters