Cameras and laptops

[ElizabethAtkinson]

At the soccer today I decided to avoid getting sunburnt and sat in a different spot - right near the professional photographers. I noticed a couple of them had what looked like laptops with some sort of "device" perhaps covering the screen to remove glare.

At the risk of embarrassing myself I need to ask a question (which will probably be very obvious to some of you). Why would the photographers need a laptop at the match? My assumption was to download the photos instantaneously but why wouldn't they do this at the end of the game?

I am very interested in some of you shedding some light on this query - thanks.

[kiwi]

They will often catch a great shot or moment and send it straight in via FTP to the news site, time is of the essence if you want to beat the competition, especially for online web news sites. During an injury break or at half time it helps get a jump on ingesting, captioning and transmitting too

Typically we will have wifi access via the media centre or a 3G card

The shades are really good obviously when you're in the open. Not that exe either. I have a griffgear one if you're interested

Hope that explains

[robz]

This has tested my memory and archive. ... fortunately both have worked!
In my NON official time as a volunteer at the Com games in '06, I couldn't help but take this shot of the photographers at work.
The foreground (in front of volunteers) shows a long wooden table where they had their laptops set up (at the start/finish line). The main media centre was in the G's members area and there were dozens of seats there with computers and monitors for the international media.
In front of this table you can see a restricted area just for photographers, but they also used an area to the left of the image which was not so protected.
At one stage, some of the crowd rushed down to a winning competitor who was walking by the fence... unfortunately they crushed the tele lens of one of the pro media guys... not happy. As a consequence we were stationed around this area for a time to prevent any more spectators from rushing down.

The whole event was quite an experience and I really enjoyed doing it.

photo taken with lumix fz5...

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5124/5326221733_7377572c1d_b.jpg