Photographers Blog

By Michael Dalder

After shooting 15 days of swimming, diving and synchronized swimming, the staff of Simons Dive Lodge helped me with the final dive into the Olympic pool. We went down to take our remote controlled robotic underwater camera out of the water.

To get this special perspective from below, we brought 6 Peli Cases containing some 200 kg (440 pounds) of equipment including 150 meters (yards) of power and network cables to the Aquatics Centre to place the underwater camera in the water.

Covering swimming with the underwater unit guarantees long work days as the camera can only be accessed early in the morning or after 10pm at night after the last swimming competition is over.

To get different angles I jumped into the water almost every day to change positions and lenses. I spent almost 8 hours over the last two weeks in the Olympic pool doing 25 dives to adjust, replace or rescue the remote controlled underwater camera. This was definitely longer in the Olympic pool than stars like Michael Phelps from the U.S. spent.

The timeframe allotted for us to access the camera was determined by the Olympic Broadcasting Service – often on very short notice.

By Russell Boyce

Being a picture editor for a wire agency at the London 2012 Olympics is like being a referee at a title-deciding football match. If everything goes well no one really notices you; but one big mistake and you are the most hated person in the stadium. If you call it wrong and miss the picture that captures the vivid moment of sporting agony or ecstasy you risk the jeers and frustrations of the whole team. The reward? A good picture editor has the chance to select that defining picture, the shot that the photographer doesn’t even know he or she has taken, or to crop a frame that changes a good picture into a great one.

At the London Games, Reuters has more than 55 photographers, 17 picture editors and 25 processors. My role is to edit the Gymnastics and Athletics. Below is a picture of my screen for the men’s 200m final.

Photographers have to lug pounds of gear in sweltering sunshine or heavy rain, arrive early at the venue, fight for a position or an angle, argue with anyone that they feel is in their way, prepare themselves mentally to capture a fleeting moment and all the while competing alongside the world’s best shooters who are doing the same. A fraction of a second miss and their mistake will stare out at them from papers, websites and books. They must also be technically astute enough to stream their pictures from their cameras or laptops to the editor.

By Max Rossi

In one word: a nightmare!

From my top position above the flame I have to fight with it every day and the results are both frustrating and exciting. Frustrating when a nice celebration or action are completely blurred by the heat, exciting when the heat and the composition of the picture work well together.

The best results are produced on sunny mornings as the light difference between the track and the flame is minimal so you can have the correct exposure. During the night the difference is larger so you have an overexposed flame as the track is still dark. But the funny thing about this kind of picture is that you can have a sort of tilt lens effect without even using one.

The javelin throw is a good example of this kind of picture as you can have sharp focus on the head as the rest of the image is totally blurred. Another issue is the focusing: shooting exactly through the flame you obviously have the athlete blurred so you can decide to either have the flame in focus or the blurred image in focus. Depending on which lens you use, you will have different results, both of them interesting.

Reuters photographers and editors discuss their strategy for covering Olympics track and field events from every angle, such as the highly anticipated men’s 100m final. Videography by Lucy Nicholson. Production by Jillian Kitchener.

By Eddie Keogh

My colleagues now call me the medal man. No, I’ve never won one or even got close but during the 9 days of athletics at the Olympic Stadium in London one of my jobs is to photograph every athlete that wins a medal. The unbridled joy is evident in most cases. Years of blood, sweat and tears have come to fruition and occasionally the emotion of the moment and the playing of their national anthem will bring a tear to the toughest of men and women.

For one man the emotion of the moment was just too much.

The Dominican Republic’s Felix Sanchez was here to receive a gold medal for winning the 400m hurdles. Four years earlier he received the news of the death of his grandmother on the morning of his heat. Having cried all day he ran badly and failed to get past the first round. He promised that day that he would win a medal for her and now he was fulfilling his promise. Felix cried the moment he arrived to the end of his country’s anthem.

It was a very special moment as his emotion was shown 20 meters wide on the stadium screens and the crowd stood to applaud him. I don’t mind admitting I shed a tear for him too, I doubt I was alone.

By Fred Prouser

Sunday night: A crowded newsroom at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California awaited word on the fate of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover. The largest rover, Curiosity is about the size of a small SUV with a landing system never tried before. It was being lowered by a sky crane on cables as retro rockets fired to lower the rover near Mars’ surface.

Reporters braced their fingers on their laptops. Photographers, well we were all elbow to elbow in front of large video screens, watching mission managers in the control room, hoping and waiting for the first images from the rover to be flashed on screen. After many tense moments, black and white images appeared. Then the camera cut away but then back again. My cameras motor drive went into action as I and the others shot the images off the screen. It would be well over an hour before NASA posted the imagery to a web site to download, and deadlines were to be met on this most ambitious landing on Mars.

After I was certain no other images would be shown on screen, I headed to my laptop and filed the first black and white rover image to the Singapore editing desk, also alerting to them by phone that it was en-route. Literally within minutes, the image shot by the Rover from the surface of Mars were on websites around the world. The next images to come were the photos from the control room which were pooled (shared between news agencies), shot by Brian van der Brug of the Los Angeles Times and NASA photos from the control room shot by NASA’s Bill Ingalls.

By Jeff Tuttle

As a journalist I try to approach each assignment with an open mind as to what I might see and hear to help tell that particular story with my camera.

I am a native Kansan, so I know my state very well and when Reuters approached me about shooting the current drought I jumped at the chance and accepted the assignment. Knowing that the two wetlands in central Kansas were almost dry I figured that would be the best place to start.

GALLERY: LIFE IN DROUGHT TIMES

Cheyenne Bottoms Wildlife Area, one of the two wetlands that I wanted to photograph, was our first destination (my son, 17-year-old Zach, went with me on the shoot). As we drove west we stopped and photographed some damaged crops in Harvey County and then again in Barton County. There was plenty of sunshine when we started, but storm colds were approaching fast to the west, the direction we were headed. Great, no rain for a month and here I was shooting a drought story and it was going to rain!

By Tom Peter

Some call it street art; Bosso Fataka call it “joy in shaping our environment.” The environment that surrounds the four young men of this art group is the streets of Berlin, a city that some say has become Europe’s unofficial capital of unsanctioned art in the public space.

Over twenty years after the reunification, there is an abundance of derelict houses, whole swathes of industrial wasteland and railway arches that afford artists with square kilometers worth of brickwork that’s just asking to be covered in graffiti.

But art being art, this scene’s actors have gone beyond the traditional spray can work. There’s stenciling, urban knitting, urban gardening… you name it. The interested visitor can go on a tour around central Berlin, where well-informed insiders will show you the most notable examples of urban art. Bosso Fataka do what you might call “urban wrapping.”

By Luke MacGregor

With very little understanding of astronomy but with the aid of a phone app, I began a three evening attempt to capture the moon with the Olympic Rings. The rings have been hanging iconically on Tower Bridge for the London 2012 Olympic Games and it was suggested to me that a full moon should – at the right angle – cross through them.

Day One – Having planned to be in the “perfect” spot on London Bridge with a good view of the Olympic Rings further up river and using the app information, I waited for the moon to rise. However the horizon itself was a little cloudy. When the moon eventually showed itself about 10 minutes after the app’s moonrise time it was off to the right hand side of the bridge. I hadn’t taken into account that the moon wouldn’t rise in a vertical line but would travel across the sky. So, by a combination of it appearing late through cloud and miscalculation, I was totally in the wrong place. I rushed carrying the tripod with a heavy 400mm lens attached and the rest of my camera gear hanging off my shoulders – running off the bridge, down several flights of steps, and to the path alongside the River Thames to try re-align the moon with the rings. However, the moon moves surprising quickly. I couldn’t manage to run far or fast enough in time to get the image before the moon rose high, over and above the bridge.

Day Two – Armed with my 400mm, only a monopod and less gear, ready to run after the moon should I be in the wrong location again, I returned to London Bridge. A recalculation had been made. The moon was rising later and at a slightly different angle to the night before. From my previous mistakes I knew that when the moon was on the horizon it needed to be to my left in order for it to move across through the rings. However, to my dismay, the rings were not there. As Tower Bridge is a combined bascule and suspension bridge (i.e. the carriageway lifts to allow boats through) it had raised in preparation to allow a vessel through. I waited just in case they might be lowered, taking in the misfortune of looking at what would have been the perfect shot – that didn’t happen.

By David W Cerny

Right in the middle of the summer season in Czech Republic, divers show off their guts in a cliff-diving competition at the flooded quarry near the central Bohemian village of Hrimezdice.

This event has a 13 year history and is getting bigger every year. It was just a few courageous jumpers in the beginning, but now its a very popular cliff diving and music festival with thousands of visitors and more then 60 jumpers.

Anyone who is not afraid to jump into the water from 12, 16 or even 20 meters high can apply to this crazy competition, which includes all freestyle dives. The divers have the possibility to create as large a splash as possible and perform loops, somersaults, twists or just freaky movements right before the splashdown.