By Wolfgang Rattay

Being a news photographer and a senior photo editor is never boring. The past seven days will, I think, impressively explain what I am talking about.

Last Saturday I went to Munich to edit Germany’s soccer cup final (the DFB Pokal). I finished at midnight after looking at some 3,000 files of which about 60 images hit our services following Bayern Munich’s historic “Treble” – victory in the Champions League, the national soccer championships and the Cup.

Early Sunday morning I went to Munich’s famous square Marienplatz to reserve a spot for my Reuters TV colleagues and myself at a podium in front of the balcony where the team was expected to show up a couple of hours later. I took an early picture of a hard-core bare-chested Bayern fan who had been waiting since 9am for the 5pm show. It had been raining all day and the thermometer reached a maximum of 7 degree Celsius (44 degrees Fahrenheit).

The team was expected at 2pm but didn’t show up before 4pm. It was raining cats and dogs. When they finally left the balcony an hour later all my gear, including myself, was totally soaked. It was a disaster for everyone (except our hardcore fan).

On Monday I was supposed to have a day off but due to the never-ending rain, I was sent to cover the floods at the junction of the three rivers Danube, Inn and Ilz in the southeastern Bavarian city of Passau. Tuesday morning Chancellor Merkel, bidding for re-election in Germany’s general elections, visited the flooded city of Passau.

Later in the afternoon our Berlin office had finally found a pilot that was able to fly us over the city. None of the nearby German smaller airports were willing to fly me through this atrocious weather conditions.

But a 22-year-old pilot in the nearby flooded city of Schaerding in Austria was prepared to take me. Roland and I removed the right side door of his Cessna and off we took to come back an hour later with story-telling images.

In the evening I went back to Passau and photographed people fighting against the effects of the flood.

By Wednesday morning the clean-up had started in the Austrian city of Schaerding that produced front page images for our Austrian clients.

Once Robert and I took off again that afternoon he let me steer the Cessna to Deggendorf by myself. Flying was great fun. But what we saw was anything but funny. Houses were completely surrounded by water. Trucks were stranded on the flooded A3 motorway – one of Europe’s most frequented traffic routes. A film of oil floated on the water caused by flooded heating tanks from households. Hundreds of homes had to be evacuated in the region’s worst floods in a decade. We were both shocked.

On Thursday, the Bavarian federal prime minister Seehofer, also seeking re-election in his home state later this year, was to visit Deggendorf. I took a bread-and-butter picture and then moved on to another place where the police had started to evacuate several villages endangered by dams that could no longer stand against the massive water pressure. I was not allowed to enter because it was too dangerous to enter the area of a possible dam break.

But I moved on to a nearby village where I had seen soldiers carrying sandbags. I took some pictures and then Hubert found me. Hubert, a landscape planner, offered me a boat tour through Niederalteich, a village of 2000 people south of Deggendorf. He had never steered a canoe himself but luckily for him, I am an experienced kayaker and canoe driver. Our three-hour tour through the flooded street produced impressive images of how people handled these tough times with pride and a huge amount of improvisation.

On Friday, news reports said that parts of the highway A92 that crosses the Danube river and the still-closed A3 motorway could be re-opened in the early morning hours. I steered my car onto the bridge and stopped with my hazard lights on to take pictures. It took less than a minute for a police patrol to discover me. A German press card doesn’t always works well – but I was lucky that I had met nice guys who secured the street for me while I took pictures of the still-flooded A3 down below.

After filing these images to our Berlin office directly from the camera I went to the helicopter landing area nearby hoping to get a free chopper flight with the German Federal Police Bundespolizei. I was lucky to meet a very professional press officer (thanks Frau Borgschulze) and an hour later I was sitting in the door of a Super Puma helicopter while the police gave local politicians a tour over their flooded homeland. All I can say: shooting from the open door of a chopper at some 400-500 feet over ground is much, much easier than shooting from a removed Cessna door at an allowed minimum height of 2,000 feet.

After all this, the week has not been boring, I can tell you. And there will be more to be done when the water of the Danube hopefully recede. The evacuated people will return to their homes and a lot of tears will be shed. Let’s hope I did not produce nice images for the politician’s upcoming election campaigns and they stick to their promises to “non-bureaucratically paid compensation” to the victims of the floods.

Reuters robotic cameras will not only be hung high up at the Olympics venues but will also go underwater.

We have developed a remote-controlled “underwater photographer” that can hold its breath for the duration of the Olympic Aquatic competitions at the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Let me tell you briefly about the history of Reuters underwater news photography.

In 2005, at the Montreal World Aquatic Championships, Canada chief photographer Peter Jones used the first underwater housing with the first model digital camera that could send pictures through our ftp-server installed poolside.

(Photo by Christine Muschi)

After improving our system through several European and World Aquatic Championships, we have reached the London Olympics; putting us on another level of technology that we will use to be competitive.

At first we looked into available underwater robotic heads to buy in order to save time in developing a new system.

We couldn’t find anything that would fit our underwater system requirements, that would be good for a news agency, easy to use and reliable. Please keep in mind that it takes a lot of effort to install a remote camera system underwater during the competition. You need to get a lot of permission and you have limited time to spend underwater, not to mention that our photographer has to be a qualified diver to make this installation.

We had an excellent brainstorming session that brought on board Peter with his first experience, Wolfgang with his new housing experience and Pawel Kopczynski who knows everything about robotic cameras.

In the end we decided to look beyond standard underwater photography and contacted a few off-shore and oil-platform companies to ask them how they operate underwater with their systems when it comes to pictures and videos.

Do you remember the underwater images from the oil spill off the “Deep Water Horizon” oil platform that dominated headlines after an explosion and subsequent spill?

We found an underwater engineer in northern Germany who builds a type of moving-heads for similar tasks. Believe it or not, the head you see below can withstand pressure of more than 600 atmospheric bar per square centimeter and can go to a depth of 6,000 meters. At the Olympic Stadium we will be facing a maximum pressure of 0,5 bars! We are certainly ready now to cover any upcoming underwater assignments, even in the depths of the Ocean.

That was the first step. All the testing went well and we were ready to go underwater until we realized that our old housing, superb a few years ago, was not good enough to handle the new models of cameras and the zoom mechanism.

We went back to Germany’s probably most advanced maker of professional underwater housings, who we had worked closely with on previous projects, and asked him for immediate help as we were running out of time. German precision was certainly helping us. Can you imagine that the entire project is made only through the computer, based on camera measurements and other elements? Then the file goes to a company who uses a specialized system which simply creates the housing from one piece of aluminum.

When all the pieces were in hand, the underwater system was ready for the last tests. Our Munich staff photographer Michael Dalder, who will be operating the system, spent a lot of time underwater at the local swimming pool to make sure that everything is ready to go!

If you’re really interested in understanding how we at Reuters work as a team across Europe to make sure that the right pictures from the Euro 2012 soccer championships arrive in time at hundreds of online sites and the next day in the papers, read this insight. You will understand that everyone in the team is an important cog in the machine and that not everything is someone sitting in the right corner of the pitch and triggering the camera’s shutter. If you read until the end, you will be rewarded with Amanda’s secret “spell-checker” recipe. It’s worth it — but only if you don’t have any health issues with your stomach.

SLIDESHOW: BEST OF EURO 2012

At each game we have five photographers assigned to cover the match. Four are seated, preferably, in each far corner of the pitch near the corner pole and the fifth shooter has an elevated position in the middle of the tribune – more or less at the same position as the main TV cameras. The ‘tribune photographer” shoots with three cameras. Two cameras are equipped with a 70-200mm zoom lens and aimed at both penalty boxes to make sure we have the image that tells the story of the game. This can be a goal, a penalty or a disallowed goal like in the England-Croatia match. The third camera is hand-held with either a four, five or six-hundred mm lens to shoot clear action (with green grass and no advertising boards), reactions of coached players and what ever else happens on the pitch.

The pitch shooters have to operate three hand-held cameras with 400/500 or 600mm, one with a 70-200mm zoom and a third body with a 16-35 in case there’s a goal celebration just a meter in front of the photographer. On top of this, the pitch photographer has to trigger a foot-switch on a fourth (sometimes fifth camera) that is connected to a goal camera that is positioned just a yard or so behind the goal. Look for the cameras set-up behind the goal mouth next time it appears close on TV. These 19 cameras at least, for each game adds up to an average minimum of 4,000 to 5,000 frames that someone has to look at. One of these “someones” is me. But there is also another editor involved that is as important (if not more) as the photographer. This is the person known as the processor.

Let me explain how the Photographer-Editor-Processor chain works; by using the internet and Reuters advanced software called Paneikon.

As an editor I sit in the warm, cosy and most importantly dry office in Berlin and look through the internet at the images of two photographers sitting on each side of the pitch, while another editor takes the opposite side and, a third editor looks at all remote and tribune cameras. The first usable action images of a match arrive about two minutes after kick-off and then the flow of pictures doesn’t stop until the final whistle. I look at thumbnails of the images and decide which are best. The image then arrives within seconds in the systems of our clients across the world and will later show up on pages like the Reuters galleries.

Now our spell-checker comes into action. There is an old agency saying “be first – but first, be right”. To ensure this standard Amanda Andersen, one of our top Reuters and most experienced editors, at half-time mixes a so-called ‘spell-checker’ for all the match editors. It’s nothing less than a well-made, super spicy and honestly the hottest “Bloody Mary” … but without alcohol. After two weeks of the Euro 2012, I either have a cast-iron stomach or one that works without complaints. Those “spell-checkers” sure sharpen the senses as tiredness sets-in from looking at so many frames of football.

What is rule number one? Journalism works very simply. When a dog bites a man – this is not a story. Dogs bite men. Unless the man is Prince Charles or the President of the United States, nobody is interested. But the opposite case – when a man bites a dog – that’s a story. The story will be even bigger if the man who bites the dog is the U.S. President and the dog belongs to Prince Charles.

However, in the future I must change my seminars and change the picture from the dog to the octopus “Paul” — better known as the “octopus oracle” at the Sea Life Aquarium of Oberhausen, a former coal mining and steel producing city in western Germany.

The two-and-a-half year-old octopus has become a star all over the world by predicting all six of Germany’s 2010 World Cup games correctly – two defeats and four victories.

With his nine brains it takes him only a few moments to choose between two glass boxes – each filled with a delicious mussel. Each box is decorated with the flags of the respective teams that are scheduled to clash in South Africa. The keepers of the Sea Life Aquarium strictly follow the FIFA regulation: the home team gets the left box and the guest team receives the right box. Then hungry Paul reaches with one of his eight tentacles into one of the boxes to steel the little mussel. When the mussel quickly disappears into his mouth a whole nation is plunged into disbelief or jubilation.

The first time I covered Paul’s prediction for Reuters was before the classic clash between England and Germany. Only a handful of TV cameras – most of them local or domestic TV – were there. Then there were, including myself, four photographers from Germany’s biggest daily and three wire agencies. After Paul predicted the Germany-England match and the following game (Germany vs. Argentina) correctly – the media coverage got completely out of hand.

One cannot imagine how many cameras can fit in a two meter square area in front of Paul’s glass window that is only slightly bigger than the size of an A1 placard. The media scrum for Paul’s next prediction, the semi-final between Germany and Spain, was even bigger. Dozens of semi-professional wanna-be-journalists arrived prior to the match with their (no joking) mobile phone cameras to glimpse Paul’s prediction. The “real” professionals pleaded to the PR-manager of the Sea Life Aquarium to end the “zoo situation” and form a pool and/or give the agencies and newspapers that had come from the very beginning to cover the Paul story the places in the front row. In fact, there is only one row that one can work from.

The respective photographers kneel some 50 cm (20 inches) in between and in front of the tripods of the TV cameras that use the other 50 cm of space in front of Paul’s aquarium window. It’s not fun sometimes to be a photographer – to be squeezed in like cattle while working in temperatures of 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) and humidity that feels to be approaching 100 per cent.

To make sure I got a good spot, I got up early today to talk with the Sea Life management and my colleagues of our competitors and TV stations to arrange dignified working conditions. I was there two hours ahead of the time when Paul was scheduled to pick the winner of the so-called “little final” between Uruguay and Germany. Paul picked Germany. Some 45 minutes later he was hungry again and chose Spain as the 2010 World Cup winners over the Netherlands in Sunday’s final.

All of my colleagues were very grateful with Paul for choosing so fast. It didn’t seem to matter whether he picked Spain or the Netherlands. Kneeling in front of an octopus under these circumstances makes you think how stupid sometimes our job in the media is and how simple journalism works: a story is a story when a man bites a dog — or nowadays when a hungry octopus picks the correct mussel from a glass box.