There’s just a little more than a week to go until the opening ceremony for the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Competing in the Olympics will be the greatest athletes from around the world – more than 10,000 in all. Each of these athletes will compete in at least one of the 306 events that will take place across 28 different sports.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that it takes a lot of manpower – and even more camera power – to capture each and every one of the athletes throughout their respective events. As it is for the athletes, the Olympics are one of the largest stages in the world for photojournalists from around the globe to flex their creative muscles.
To achieve this, it takes a lot of gear, especially if you’re one of the largest photo agencies in the world, Getty Images.
The company showed off a collection of cameras and lenses that will be making its way to Rio. And it is a feast – especially if you’re a Canon shooter.
Getty Images exclusively uses Canon equipment, and from the looks of it, a lot of it. As seen in the above photo, the camera body of choice for this year’s Olympics is the Canon EOS 1DX Mark II, a full-frame monster designed with demanding photojournalism in mind, as well as some 50.6-megapixel EOS 5DS R models.
As for lenses, it’s hard to tell exactly what Getty brought to South America from the images alone. But it’s safe to say photographers will be hard-pressed to find a piece of glass that isn’t available to shoot with.
A photo posted by Michael Heiman (@heiman225) on Jul 23, 2016 at 7:50am PDT
A few curious Redditors did some back-of-the-napkin math to figure out the approximate value of the equipment shown. The general consensus is that there’s at least $200,000 worth of camera bodies and more than twice that in lenses in the first photo released by Getty. By my own math, the second image has at least another quarter of a million dollars in lenses.
Photography isn’t cheap. Especially when it comes to the biggest sporting event in the world. Keep an eye on the sidelines during the Olympics and see what fun cameras and lenses you can spy.
