Olympic Photographers Storm the Mountains

With technology constantly changing the way we live, I knew this year’s coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympic in Vancouver was going to be pretty epic. Getty Images sent their photographers up to Vancouver for the games, locked and loaded with artillery a marine would envy.

Two Nikon D3ses, 24-70mm lens, 400mm lens, 500/600mm lens, 1.4x teleconverter, batteries and memory cards.

We’re talking some serious lenses, plus a 3+ mile hike up the mountain. Perspiration will ensue. Change of clothes will be needed. Chocolate is a must.

With competitions speeds of over 90mph, one can imagine the preparation and pure luck involved with getting the right shot.  Being an amateur shutterbug myself, I know that positioning is crucial. And if you don’t have a key position from the start, you have to make the best with what you got. You have to really love this stuff to be a photographer, and you have to really love this sport to be a winter sports photographer.

Of course the money isn’t terrible. With publications all over the world covering the 2010 Winter Games, the perfect shot could yield some decent kickback.

Read more at: pocket-lint.com

Olympic Mission Control

Behind the scenes at mission control, there are teams of people making sure the information network between competition locations is up and running smoothly. A slip up here could mean cascading failures for many.

With around 6,000 PCs, 800 servers, 800 networking devices and 130 terabytes of data, surprisingly, computers have not been a problem.

“In here, our objective is to be bored,” said Atos Origin’s Magnus Alvarsson, one of those in charge of overseeing the Olympics’ IT setup.

When asked about the team behind the scenes by CNET correspondent Ina Fried, Alvarsson responded, “On the ground here employed by Atos Origin in Vancouver, we are about 115 people. The cool thing there is we are 32 nationalities (represented) in those 115 people. During the Games I get help from the rest of (the company). We will be about 250 people here just specialized on running major events. The full scope of the people we have to manage including the rest of the partners and volunteers is about 2,000–Acer, Sun, Avaya, and so forth.”

So with all this delicate equipment, what’s giving Magnus the most problems? Humans. Remembering passwords seems to be the biggest issue, says Alvarsson. We hear ya, Magnus.

Read more at: CNET.com

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