olympics

ESPN W recently hired editorial and commercial photographer Gina LeVay (@ginalevay) to capture environmental portraits of first-time Olympians. The assignment took Levay to six countries around the world over a two month period, and resulted in a stunning set of images.

Former Russian Olympic swimmer Evgeny Korotyshkin usually reserves his Instagram for posting pictures of swimming events or selfies with his medals. But when he was robbed at gunpoint yesterday in Rio, he posted a very different photo: a picture of the gun-wielding teens who allegedly robbed him.

Brad Smith has spent a career editing sports photography. First as a sports editor at Sports Illustrated, then as a senior sports editor at The New York Times, and most recently a return to SI as its Director of Photography. But for the next two weeks, he is editing the 2016 Rio Olympic Games photography for ABCNews.com and putting together a daily slideshow of the best images.

The stakes at the Olympics are unimaginably high... and we're not only talking about the athletes. As a professional photographer at the Olympics, you're constantly searching for a unique vantage point. Getty Images is finding theirs by using fancy robotic underwater housings.

We recently shared the impressive Canon DSLR arsenal Getty Images brought to the Rio 2016 Olympics. Here's something else that's impressive: the agency team of photographers and photo editors at the Games can snap, edit, and share official Olympic photos in as little as two minutes.

The IOC has a lot to worry about this Olympics: making sure the athletes are safe, making sure the media is safe, making sure the press knows they are NOT allowed under any circumstances to share GIFs... wait, what!? Yes, that's correct, the International Olympic Committee has banned GIFs.

Getty Images, one of the largest stock photo agencies in the world and the official photo agency of the International Olympic Committee, is preparing for Rio by embracing the role of virtual reality in photography's future.

Photography safety is a growing concern leading up to the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This past weekend, a group of photographers were mugged and had their expensive equipment stolen while covering a road cycling test event for next year's Games.

Two months after being in Sochi to cover the 2014 Winter Olympics, photographer Guy Rhodes is sharing some of the images he captured there. But they’re not just any images. They’re analog images. 4x5 images, to be exact.

Using 34 sheets of Tri-X and a Crown Graphic 4x5 camera, Rhodes describes capturing the games with such a beast (while also shooting digital) as, "among the top experiences [in his] life."

Gabe L'Heureux isn't just one of the busiest men in the business, take one look through his work and you'll quickly realize he's one of the best. His photos expertly showcase stunning forces of nature and athletes brave enough to endure them. Yet, despite the rugged qualities of his subject matter, his work tends to have an ethereal quality to it, lending a particular brand of beauty to the harsh environments he captures.

It's this rare ability to capture the balance of violence and elegance that has earned Gabe jobs with the likes of Oakley, Target, ESPN and Red Bull, just to name a few. And this is all on top of his normal gig as senior photographer/team manager for Burton Snowboards.

We were recently lucky enough to catch up with Gabe during a brief break between trips to see how his year has started off.

Want to know what it takes to photograph the Olympic Games these days? Well, according to Jeff Cable it takes the kind of speed that most photographers can only dream of, because when it comes to the Internet age, people want their photos and they want them NOW.

In the picture above, taken on January 30th 2014, you see more than 315,000 Euro worth of Canon camera …

You're photographing some of the most elite athletes in the world, shortly before they step onto the international stage to compete for glory and gold. So naturally you ... make them look kind of funny?

If you've been following news about the Sochi Olympics today, you probably stumbled across one of the many reports that journalists would be banned from using non-professional gear and, in fact, stripped of accreditation on the spot if they broke the rules and pulled out their smartphones to take pictures. Thankfully, however, those reports seem to be false.

In the history of mankind, the Olympic torch has made its way up to space a total of two times: once in 1996 and another time in 2000. Now we can add another year to that list: 2013 -- only this one is even more special, because for the first time in history, the Olympic torch actually went out on its very own spacewalk.

Every two years, the lighting of the Olympic Flame amidst the ruins of the Temple of Hera is a pretty interesting performance. The torch is lit from the light of the Sun, using a parabolic mirror to focus the Sun's rays on the fuel in the torch and set it ablaze... but what exactly is that fuel? By the looks of it, at least a small part is a piece of

Photography has a rich history that is really fun to peer back into once in a while when you have a spare minute to stop oogling over the next piece of gear (*cough* NEX full-frame *cough*) that'll steal your heart and most of the funds in your bank account.

On that note, check out this awesome old review of the Pentax Spotmatic. It was written in 1965 by the late Fred Springer-Miller, and it might make you think twice before you take today's technology for granted.

Last August, we wrote about how renowned photojournalist David Burnett was spotted using a large format camera at the London Olympics. If you've been wondering how the photographs turned out, today's your lucky day.

Here's an inside look at how Burnett's project came to be, and the beautiful images that resulted.

Billy Rowlinson is a photographer based in London. He was an official photographer at the London 2012 Olympics this past summer at the age of 18. Visit his website here.

PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Billy Rowlinson: I'm Billy Rowlinson, I was born and currently live in London, United Kingdom. I turned 19 in October and I'm currently on a gap year before hopefully going to study Film Production at university.

Usain Bolt ran beyond the boundaries of sports and made headlines in the world of photography earlier this year at the London Olympics. After winning yet another gold in his 200m race, he ran over to Scandinavian newspaper photographer Jimmy Wixtröm, grabbed his Nikon D4, and began shooting some awesome photographs of what he was experiencing.

Wixtröm just sent us an email with some neat news: the famous D4 is now being auctioned with the proceeds going to charity.

As we shared last week, being a sports photographer at the Olympics is a difficult task: battling a round-the-clock schedule and a sea of competing photographers, hauling around a boatload of gear from venue to venue is just the least of your concerns.

Here's a video that offers a peek into the life of a Reuters photographer covering the Olympics. It features photographers and editors on the Reuters team talking about the joys and challenges of shooting the biggest sporting event in the world.

Ever wonder what it's like to be the world's fastest man winning a gold medal at the Olympics? Usain Bolt wants you to know.

After sprinting to victory in the 200m race today, Bolt proceeded to run over to the photographers' pit, commandeer a Nikon DSLR from one of the photographers, and snap super wide angle views of what he was experiencing. The photographer, Jimmy Wixtröm of Aftonbladet (Scandinavia's largest paper), left the event with memories of a lifetime and a memory card containing epic images that are the envy of many a sports photographer.

What happens if you take photos of synchronized swimming shot at the Olympics and flip them upside-down? Ethereal beauty, that's what.

The Huffington Post did this experiment yesterday using photographs shot by Getty and AFP photographers. The results are magical.

Reuters photographer Luke MacGregor doesn't know much about astronomy, but he had the idea recently of photographing the full moon rising up into the Olympic Rings found on London's Tower Bridge. Armed with a phone app that informed him of moonrise times, he spent two evenings trying and failing to create the photo. Finally, on the third evening, he succeeded:

I readied myself at the predicted angle to the rings. The moon would be rising at 8:50pm and would hit the rings by about 9pm. As the moon had been rising later each evening it had become darker than the previous evenings. I wished I had my tripod. Nonetheless, using the Canon 5D MkIII meant I could push the ISO a little further than I would normally have chosen for a late evening shot. Exactly on time the moon began to show itself over the horizon, a lovely peachy color. I had to keep an eye on a changing exposure, balancing the brightness of the moon with a rapidly darkening sky. As it rose I had to keep moving along, mercilessly pushing tourists out of the way who had stopped to look, in order to keep the moon in line with the rings. Finally, after three days, I had the picture I had been trying to achieve.

If you were given the task of shooting gymnastics at the Olympics, what camera would you use? The Canon EOS-1D X for its 14fps capabilities?

At least one Olympic sports photographer chose something much slower, much larger, and much older.

The subjects in portrait projects are often selected for something they all have in common. The people seen in Brooklyn-based photographer Caroll Taveras' project You Are Here have this in common: they were lost at the Olympics. Commissioned by Mother London, Taveras finds tourists at the Olympic games who are hopelessly lost, and then guides them to their desired destinations in exchange for a portrait.

Basketball superstar Kobe Bryant is one of the most graceful players in the NBA, but put a camera in his hands and he becomes a mere mortal. Bryant was spotted by television cameras at a Roger Federer Olympic tennis match having trouble with his Canon DSLR and telephoto L lens. He is seen asking someone -- presumably a photographer -- for help, only to be told that the lens cap was still on.

Nate Jones over at Metro was recently looking through Getty Images in search of Olympic beach volleyball photos, when he came upon an interesting/"gross" discovery: some of the photographs focused on the body rather than the athlete or the sport. While other Olympic sport photos focus on action and emotion, it seems that certain beach volleyball photographers are intent on snapping images of behinds.

That got Jones thinking, "what if every Olympic sport was photographed like women's beach volleyball?" He then decided to take other shots of other sports and crop them through the lens of volleyball photographers. Here's a sampling of the hilarious images.

We’ve seen some very heavy-duty gear lugged out to cover the Olympic games in London this year: some …

A photographer at the London 2012 Olympics was spotted by a television camera making an embarrassing mistake that’s usually …

Sports photographers sitting close to the action occasionally take a beating when athletes leave their field of play. This …

Nikon’s massive 800mm f/5.6 super-telephoto lens hasn’t been launched yet, but English press photographer …