Alain Bernard of France is seen from underwater as he enters the water to set a new world record of 47.60 seconds during the 100m freestyle in the men’s semi-finals at the European Swimming Championships in Eindhoven March 21, 2008. REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay
Please forward my compliments to Wolfgang Rattay for a beautiful picture of Alain Bernard published in Libération on 22-23 March 2008.As a film technician, I am wondering where he has taken the picture from.
Jacqueline G.
Thanks for noticing. This photo of Wolfgang and his camera may give you a hint about how he took it. Meanwhile, you should also check our Photo Blog, where Reuters photograpers talk about their job and their noteworthy photographs: GBU Editor



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2 comments so far
Thanks for the flowers. But may be the above hint is misleading. I am not shooting from underwater during competition. That of course is not possible. I have to pre-position my UK-Germany underwater housing that contains a regular Canon EOS 1D Mark 2N with most of the times a 15mm fish-eye lens. When the swimmers hit the water or swim over my camera, I release it through a waterproof cable. Then the date is transferred from the camera into an other housing that contains a Canon WFT-E1 unit. This is basically a transmitter that transforms the camera’s firewire data into ftp-language and transfers it via a regular LAN cable into my laptop. Within seconds after the race I am than able to transmit the picture to our desk operation in Singapore that puts it out to world immediately. The underwater pictures of Alain Bernard were out on the wire four minutes after the Frenchman set a new world record over 100m freestyle. I would call this a world record too. None of our competitors that also put cameras into the pool has figured it out yet, how to make the bad-behaving transmitter permanently work from underwater. Their guys have to jump into the pool to dig out their cards. Of course after the competition that takes two or more hours. Hope this info helps.
- Posted by Wolfgang RattayCiao and cheers Wolfgang Rattay
Amazing! Loved Mr. Rattay’s follow-up.
- Posted by Lauren Thomas