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Olympic photography: Clive Brunskill & Mike Hewitt

More than 11,000 athletes participated in this summer's Beijing Olympics, competing in 302 events. Those are impressive numbers, but not when compared with the stats of Getty Images. Getty photographers recorded 180GB -- 40,000 images -- per day. That’s 640,000 over the entire event.
Overall, the photographic archive recorded was 4TB in size, and even more impressive is that only one call was made to the Getty Images support line.
Professional Photographer's Georgie Woof caught up with two Getty sports photographers -- Mike Hewitt and Clive Brunskill.

By Mike Hewitt

For the photographers, the schedule was elaborate. "Unlike some of the other organisations covering the Olympics, we were told to rotate between all of the sports for the duration of the Games. Each day was planned, and each photographer had a stint shooting most, if not all, of the sports,” says Brunskill.
The rotation allowed the photographers to try capturing various sports while letting them play to their individual strengths.

“Steve Rose, director of photography for sport at Getty Images, asked me to cover the tennis finals. He had really done his homework, placing each of us at the finals of our strongest event. There were some pictures that he had to guarantee we [the photographers] could deliver, so of course, putting the best gymnastics photographer to cover the swimming finals would have been ludicrous,” says Brunskill.

Due to Getty Images’ involvement with the IOC (International Olympic Committee) fulfilling each of the image requests was crucial.

Hewitt and Brunskill rose to the challenge. “I was capturing at least 3000 images per day. Not all of them fantastic quality, mind. But I would be at an event from the very start to the end, anywhere between 7am through to 9pm. And if I wanted to use the catwalks above to get aerial shots I’d have to turn up even earlier, as the camera needed to be secured by cables at least two hours in advance,” says Brunskill. “Obviously the safety of the athletes was vital, and it would have been just awful if one of the cameras had fallen on to someone competing below."

Of course, there were moments for both photographers when they felt that they’d never get the shots they needed. “One of the biggest struggles I had to face was when I’d been asked to cover the women’s beach volleyball. The rain was unbelievable, and with the extreme heat severe condensation soon formed on the viewfinder. I was effectively shooting blind, praying for some decent images.

Which images were they proudest of? “I think the one that sums up the greatest moment of the Olympics for me, is my picture of Usain Bolt celebrating as he crossed the finish line of the 200m men’s race,” Brunskill says.
Hewitt's most memorable moment came during one of the qualifying rounds in the shooting competition -- not one of the sexiest events in the Games. “I was set on getting an image of a cartridge flying out the top of a gun. It took me all day to get that image, but when I finally did I was so pleased.”

Mike Hewitt, below

When the last of the events was over, Hewitt had just one more assignment: the closing ceremony. “We’d heard that David Beckham was attending, and that he planned to kick a football into the stadium. I was told to get ‘the shot’. “However, when Beckham appeared, not only was he hidden from the lights, but he was wearing a black tracksuit too. I got the image I needed, but I really had to push the boundaries. I dropped the settings on my Canon EOS-1D MkIIn to a 1/60sec, and the football ended up looking like a sausage,” says Hewitt. Both photographers know it’s the team effort from Getty Images that allowed them to do their jobs so well. “A group of extremely skilled IT bods had been to Beijing a month before us, setting up cables in every available section of the sporting arenas. This system, recently adopted by Getty Images, allowed us to simply plug in our cameras after an event, and send all the images straight to the picture editors, who were ready and waiting to caption and edit them,” says Hewitt.

The picture editors sorted through the images immediately, allowing them to get them on Getty Images’ website within minutes of being taken. Using this new technology, named GIFT (Getty Images Field Tool), Getty Images and its immense team of over 70 people were able to conquer this huge event.