Culture

This is How Getty Gears Up for the Olympics

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There are just a few days remaining until the Rio Olympics kicks off in earnest, and despite a few athletes expressing concerns about the upcoming games, Getty Images will be covering all the events in style.

The company took to Twitter yesterday to show off their arsenal and incite gear envy in photographers of all stripes. Using exclusively Canon gear, the agency will capture more than 1.5 million images over the next few weeks.

The body of choice for this year appears to be the Canon 1DX Mark II, which has had a few teething problems, but appears to have won over the Getty team. Also included are a pair of Canon 5DS-Rs, which look almost insignificant compared to their much larger cousins.

Getty’s Managing Editor, Michael Heiman, also shared a table full of glass on Instagram, which looks absolutely magnificent. Clearly Getty couldn’t find a table large enough to accommodate all of their kit, but it’ll surely all get a decent workout once the games kick off on August 5th.

Ken Mainardis, the vice president of sports imagery and services for Getty Images recently spoke to Popular Photography, revealing the vast amount of manpower than goes into capturing, editing and distributing such a huge volume of images around the world to various media organisations. “We edit every frame live now. And ‘every frame’ means around 1.5 million images across the 16 days of the games,” he explained. “Those 1.5 million images are edited down to around 80,000 finished pictures that we send to customers. So, you can see that the editors are as much stars as anybody else in that process. To be able to edit that kind of quantity down to a product that makes sense is an incredible skill.”

Eagle-eyed redditors speculated around the cost of the gear on display, coming up with rough estimates of US$200,000 for bodies and up to twice that for lenses in the first image alone. Hopefully Getty didn’t cheap out on the table.