Photographers Blog

(View a slideshow of some of the best photos from Daegu here.)

By Daegu Team

Day Nine.

How we won the story.

World Athletics Championship in Daegu from Reuters Tokyo Pictures on Vimeo.

Day Eight.

By Peter Jebautzke, Eric Tam and KiWhan Kim. First things first; it’s just like my morning ritual, get up, brush teeth and down a double espresso – then we are ready to take on the world.

Our stadium ritual is also always the same, get here, check the network connectivity and power outlets which are in more than a dozen locations strategically placed around the stadium. In excess of one kilometer of network cable was laid giving us super fast transmission of photos including the two remote cameras on the stadium roof.

The weather forecast was not good today. It said rain and although it this has been said everyday, we have to plan for the worse and just hope for the best. So, this means covering everything in plastic containers to weather proof the sensitive IT equipment.

All of our spare laptops are no longer spare – they are all being used now, as a number of laptops had to be repaired or replaced following days of heavy use.

Two more days to go and to be honest we are not looking forward to the brutal task of removing all the equipment and somehow fitting it all back into the right Peli case. Then we have to deal with customs and ship all the gear back to Europe.

Day Seven.

By David Gray. Shooting from above – the head-on position.
 
Over the past decade, I have photographed 3 Olympic Games and 4 World Athletics Championships from the same position, the head-on camera platform. Called the ‘high or elevated position’, and sometimes referred to as ‘The Nest’, it is from here that I have photographed countless winners of races and their celebrations. While the nest position give you a view of some of the field events, the primary reason we place a photographer in this spot is for the unobstructed view of athlete’s winning races.

 
Along with being prepared to photograph the winners, I am also the person expected to capture the many incidents that occur over the course of the competition that my elevated position allows me to see. I am particularly interested in photographing the moment during a race or event that will determine the outcome.

Confined to a few feet on a platform that keeps me from moving around the track to find nice angles for action pictures, I instead stand in a place where I can see every event that is going on at any given time and just wait for the moments to happen in front of me. To accomplish this, you need to be constantly alert and aware of what is going on all times, as these incidents tend to happen extremely quickly and without warning.

Some examples over the years have included a competitor snapping a hurdle with her foot, a steeplechase runner falling and smashing his face into a hurdle, athletes falling during a race either due to injury or tripping over a fellow competitor, 4×100 meters relay runners dropping the baton, and occasionally the biggest story of the whole meet; favorites for the 100 and 400 meters races being disqualified.

At times, ‘The Nest’ can be extremely frustrating and tedious, watching our photographers below getting nice ground level action or celebration pictures but sometimes, with patience and attention, it can be extremely rewarding and provide you with that unique moment.

 
By Pawel Kopczynski.  A miniature remote camera.

It was early afternoon and everyone in Daegu Stadium had left for their lunch break leaving me in a quiet venue. Sitting in the press tribune catching up on the endless emails that build up when on a multi-day assignment, I saw a few wheelchair athletes preparing for a training session on the track.

Instantly an idea came to my mind as I thought of another opportunity to get an unusual pictures which would be impossible to photograph during the competition. I grabbed a few of the miniature cameras we have been using and rushed down to the track.

I started chatting with a few of the athletes and finally convinced some of them to allow me to clamp the cameras to their wheelchairs for a couple of laps of the track. One of the competitors was Madison de Rozario from Australia who was more than obliging to allow me to take a picture from a different perspective!

 
Later on I uploaded the pictures to a laptop so everyone could see what I want to do and using Madison as an example I convinced a few more athletes to make a few rounds with the camera.  The resulting pictures made the effort more than worthwhile.

Day Six

Candida Ng,  Janice Kaur, Aaron Low and Zulkifli Jamil – Technology plays a major role in journalism today and here at the Global Pictures Desk, the IAAF World Championships is a great way to showcase it.

While the photographers have been sweating it out in hot and humid Daegu, four of us picture editors in Singapore have been in charge of remotely processing the images. This involves us using Reuters proprietary software to receive the photos from the onsite editors and then sending them onward to clients from Singapore, 4,600 km away from Daegu.

We’re processing the championships from our office, the global headquarters for the Reuters pictures operation. Having set up our computers to process the images, we communicate with the two dedicated editors in Daegu over instant messaging and monitor the live results and updates on the well-organized official championships website.

Being offsite comes with its own challenges, like having to be more resourceful when it comes to following each day’s coverage. Regardless of how busy we get processing, we traditionally watch live broadcasts of the major events, such as the sprint finals, to have a clear idea of how everything unfolds.

When we lost the live broadcast of the men’s 100 meters final on television, a mad scramble ensued to look for a live stream online, and we only just managed to see Usain Bolt get disqualified for a false start. Being able to witness such moments allows us to get a clear overview of the kind of images the Daegu team sends us and helps us help them with a second eye in case the team misses out on an important angle or moment. 

Challenges aside, remote editing means getting to enjoy the comforts of the office and not having to survive on rations of instant noodles that our fellow photographers seem to be limited to for lunch!

While technology allows us to work efficiently, we definitely miss the excitement of meeting the photographers and editors face-to-face. The Daegu team regularly sends us behind-the-scenes snaps of themselves at work, making us feel we’re part of the team. Social media sites also allow us to keep up-to-date with what the crew gets up to during the downtime in between events. We had a good time laughing over candid videos of our photographers slurping their lunch and posing with athletes and enjoy reading their status updates about their day-to-day experiences.

With all its dramas and upsets, Daegu has proven to be one of the most interesting events we have had the pleasure to be a part of. With three more days of competition to go, let’s see what else Daegu has in store for us!

Many scintillating pictures of Usain Bolt walking on the track bare-chested while looking dejected started coming through and we compared pictures with each other and discussed which ones to pick for the top pictures for the day. We had to think about which pictures we felt that most newspapers would want to use the next day and which ones were just simply a work of art. Of course, the entire race was full of amazing pictures shot in amazing quality. But we also enjoyed looking at the quirky, lifestyle type of photos like the tattoos and intricate fingernail varnish that many of the athletes were sporting.

Day Five

Max Rossi – staff photographer Rome.  It’s twelve o’clock and I’m still sleeping. It’s our first quiet day since the start of competition in Daegu and I was rudely awoken by a phone call asking me to go to shoot the athletes training ground.

So grabbing the first clothes I could reach from my bed I ran there as fast as I could, but the man I was looking for, Usain Bolt, was clearly sleeping longer than me.

On my way back I suggested to my colleagues we should meet for a late breakfast in a small cafe near our accommodation. Imagine my surprise when I was greeted not by four photographers, but by the beautiful Yelena Isinbayeva a famous pole vaulter from Russia……..buongiorno!

My fellow photographers soon arrived and after a couple of coffees and a team picture with Yelena I wandered back to see if the main man had woken.

I was lucky and Bolt had just turned up and was beginning his warm up. Shooting training here is not straight forward as it is an athlete only zone. Having shot training some days earlier I knew the only approved position was from a spot just outside the track. Experience was with me and I had brought a chair from the cafe to help me see over the fence. It was time to rock ‘n roll.

Bolt, was his usual cool self and went through his paces with the rest of the Jamaican sprinters before stopping for a light massage then working on his start.

He was clearly relaxed as he posed for photographs with a line of other athletes before he left, allowing me to go back to my room to file the pictures.

After the shock of the 100 meters final, we are looking for different pictures of him than the usual and I tried to concentrate more on Bolt as a man and his emotions rather than on Bolt the runner. As a photographer he is a great subject to capture. From his super expressive face, to his perfectly toned body and gold shoes…….every inch of this man produces pictures. Though, in this case not that easily as he was so far away I had to shoot on a 500 mm lens with a 1.4 extender attached.

By Kai Pfaffenbach – staff photographer Frankfurt.  A great photographer once said “If the picture’s not good enough you weren’t close enough”!  Last night I found myself all of a sudden in a situation getting really close to the German discus thrower Robert Harting. The young, straight forward German “Hercules” won his second World Championships in a row and started an extraordinary celebration; he ripped his shirt apart and was full of joy, giving big smiles into the cameras.

Later in the evening the 2.01 m tall model athlete showed his soft side and dedicated his gold medal to a comrade from the German armed forces Bundeswehr who was killed in action in Afghanistan earlier this year. This might change the perception of some people who think he is just a big mouth.

As a matter of a fact he is not – his sporting performance is great, just great. Harting won 16 discus competitions in a row now. He likes abstract art and is studying for a degree. There is more to this guy then meets the eye.

Day 4

When covering athletics, Reuters photographers would never think they would need to wear any kind of protective gear.  Like any outdoor summer event,  here in Daegu a sunhat is mandatory during morning sessions as the stadium heats up like a bowl of hot, spicy soup.

Covering athletics shouldn’t be life threatening, right? Well so we thought! Using remote cameras positioned in various places around the field of play we installed one for the hammer throw final in our usual place on the ground at the back of the cage the competitor throws from.

By the time the event began, about 20 cameras had been placed in this low angle when all of a sudden a young Polish athlete slipped with the hammer hitting the slack net of the cage. What ensued would have been called a strike in ten pin bowling as he took out half of the cameras in one swift hit.
 
A colleague from another agency, who was sitting behind the cage where he uses a wireless transmitter for fire his camera from, was nearly hit by the heavy metal ball and chain. Lucky guy we all thought.  None of us had ever seen anything like this, and since the incident we all have been discussing the need to wear helmets while working that close to the cage. Of course, this is not serious talk but it shows another aspect of photography in general, always expect the unexpected!
 
It is highly unlikely the same thing will happen tonight during the discus competition but we will all be on red alert this time. Maybe somebody struggles at the water jump during the steeplechase, maybe another competitor has their pole breaks during women’s pole vault, maybe one of us will get run over by the TV cameraman on his segway during the lap of honor – whatever unexpected moment ensues we will be prepared for it and we will keep on shooting!

Day three

After the excitement and surprise caused by Usain Bolt’s disqualification in last night’s 100 meters final a sense of normality returned for the morning session on day three in Daegu, and brought with it bright sunshine and sweltering temperatures.

The infield positions for track and field photographers offer little place to hide from either the constant action going on all around you or the weather, and with temperatures soaring above 32 degrees centigrade conditions were tough for both the athletes, the photographers and the equipment.

The heat must have been especially hard for the men in the heats of the 3000 meters steeplechase with 7 and a bit grueling laps of the sun baked track to negotiate; at least they get to cool off once a lap by jumping through the water jump. The sun was so intense today that the low angle remote cameras we use to capture the runners as they splash through the water, which normally come back drenched after the races, were today bone dry, with just the dried staining of water droplets on the lens giving any indication that they had been wet at all.

The biggest problem faced by us this morning though was keeping all the equipment working properly,the laptops in particular suffered badly. Even using specially designed sun shades and hiding them out of the sun under our small table didn’t seem to help much and by the end of the 4 hour session they had all begun to slowdown, the internal fan struggling to cool the components which where cooking just about as quickly as the photographers using them.

For our shooters outside the track and in elevated positions the sun provides an opportunity to produce different pictures for the file, with strong and bold shadows appearing across the blue running track. Athletics is a great sport to photograph, especially at a major championship such as this, but if you are not careful the file can easily become just a steady stream of action and reaction pictures. This is where the creativity of the photographers comes into play, using different lenses and techniques, or finding different angles to produce a more visually interesting file that can appeal to our wide client base.

Whether that means using the weather to your advantage and shooting shadows, silhouettes or reflections, or trying out a small underwater camera at the bottom of the steeplechase water jump the photographers are constantly looking for new ways to add to the story of Daegu 2011 and give our clients a more complete picture of the event.

Photographers are famous for complaining…about the pictures, their positions, the weather…….the list is endless, but in summary for the morning, the weather was too hot, the sun just perfect and the water in the water jump slightly too cloudy.

Day two

Its 445pm and the four hour countdown has begun to the next “nine and a half seconds of glory” for Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt. Of all the days at the world championship, nothing matches the excitement of the last race on Day 2, the men’s 100 metres final. Typically the race caps a long road of anticipation that starts two years prior when the world champion is crowned and the world starts speculating who will be the person to beat at the next championship. While not always the case, the World Championships and the Olympics seem to be the only place the world’s fastest men compete against each other. This year unfortunately two of Bolt’s strongest competitors, Tyson Gay and Asafa Powell are injured and not running causing us to wonder if he can be pushed fast enough to set another world record. Bolt was able to break the record at the Olympics in Beijing and than again at the past World Championships in Berlin 2 years ago. Guessing before the race, we are predicting a time of 9.70.
For our photographers the preparation begins even before they came to Daegu as a lot of thought goes into what equipment they need for this specific race. Usually they play through their heads the last race they shot of Bolt and from that try and predict what kind of celebration he might perform after winning the race. It is safe to say on this day we are expecting a victory by him. How many cameras will I need from the spot I am shooting from to be fully prepared for anything that happens?
Our on site set up began this morning with photographers marking the spots they wanted to shoot from, setting up remote cameras and just settling into the mindset that within a few hours the pressure will be on to perform at the same level Usain Bolt will. We too want to win by having the best set of images of the race.
For the race we have ten photographers shooting from various spots. The first is near the starting blocks and the last is about 150 metres past the finish line. They are located high and low with most congregated in the curve past the finish line. In addition we have five cameras on the ground focused at various points from the finish line to the first curve to capture his expected celebration. We also have one camera in the roof directly above the finish line.
Our photographers are already in their spots preparing to photograph all the evenings events but their minds are thinking four hours out to the fast approaching excitement when the stadium goes from a hushed silence to the loud sound of the starting gun to a deafening roar with the winner being…………..

Chaos…

One thing you are taught early in your career is to expect the unexpected and tonight it happened. Usain Bolt false starts and is disqualified. Who would ever have thought that was possible. In a split second you go from complete concentration on the race to having photographers sprinting 100 metres from the finish line to photograph Bolt leaving the track near the starting blocks. In essence, chaos. Within a few short minutes Bolt is gone, every one composes themselves including the athletes who are just as stunned at the turn of events and the race is run. This time I am sure with a completely different mindset as they all feel they have a real chance to win. Bolt’s teammate Yohan Blake wins the race in a time of 9.92 seconds well off of Bolt’s world record time of 9.58 seconds.

Blake celebrated enjoying his victory but we are all left wondering if he will even see his picture in the newspaper tomorrow being so overshadowed by Bolt’s disqualification.

To be continued.

Day One

The first day of a World Championship or Olympic meet is always very important for our photographers to find the best angles to shoot the different events of the competition. It is very important for them to become comfortable in the stadium as there are a multiple number of places both high and low to photograph the action from.

Remote cameras play a very important role in our set up to insure that we don’t miss any action. They provide us an opportunity to put cameras in places like a roof, that a photographer can’t shoot from. At the finish line, we typically install five head-on remote cameras placed on a bar that spans all 8 lanes of the track. These cameras are operated by one photographer who also has a position head-on to the finish line. The cameras are wired to output through an ethernet network, directly into our editing system. The editors sitting in the press tribune see images instantly after they are shot.

At this competition we have placed two cameras in the roof above the field of play that are operated via remote control where everything from the angle they shoot from to zooming and focusing the lens is controlled from a computer at our desk.

Reuters team of 9 photographers, 3 editors, 5 processors and supporting technical staff are ready for the IAAF 2011 World Championships starting on August 27 in Daegu, South Korea. We will update this blog every day with the fresh selection of our TOP pictures and some interesting information about the Reuters Pictures operation at this event.

We are using Reuters proprietary technology to edit and remote process thousands of pictures shot by our photographers every day. Our editing staff directly involved in this event are not only based locally in Korea but also from Singapore, Berlin, Sofia, Bucharest and Belgrade.