If you goto the Pinterest site here, you will find 150 of the best photos from the Olympic Games in London. These are compiled from a number of sources – but the bulk of them come from the LATimes Photography Blog and the London2012.com official Olympic website. There are 3 reasons for this choice of sources of photos.
1)Both sites features some of the better shots from the games;
2)The LATimes Photography Blog includes the EXIF info for each photo which is quite valuable in figuring how the shots were done;
3)The London2012.com blog has some of the best full-sized enlargements of photos.
And both of the latter two reasons are very significant. I searched the Web and such publications as NYTimes, BBC, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, Sport.Yahoo.com, BostonGlobe, LeMonde, Sydney Morning Herald from Sports crazy Australia and a lot of others. None provided EXIF data. And none matched the generosity in size of the London2012.com website for the fullsized photos.
Criteria for the Best Images
How to choose 150 of the Best Images? Well compelling action and great composition were the top most criteria. And the crush of sports photographers at the games know their business; so they produced a multitude of interesting shots to choose from. So the the second ranking criteria were shots with a novel point of view. The Judo Exhaustion shot in the top upperleft of the Pinterest screenshot has not only that novel point of view but great color contrast as well. Another criteria was the use of photographic smarts. The Mountain Bike Shot on the second row, left on the Pinterest screen shot has two virtues. It is not only looking down on the rider and able to capure the riders shadow but also is a panning shot that conveys the remarkable speed the mountain bike riders maintained on this very tough course. Finally, graphic design criteria such as a the spiral lead-ins, rules of thirds positioning, and Golden Sectioning can be found in many of the selected best shots.
Where To Go and How to Get the Images
If you want to use the images for commercial purposes consult with London2012.com and LATimes directly. If you want to grab a few shots for personal use like a new and nifty background screen then do the following :
Go to the LATimes Photography Blog:
Then just click on any of the Olympic Day galleries. But there is a warning – the Photography Blog adds one or two new galleries every day. So the Olympic Day galleries will be pushed further down the stack over time.
Once at an Olympic Day gallery you have a couple of choices:
Well, actually many choices. If you click on the Share symbol on the upper right of the icon par above the image – there a least 2 dozen popular options for sharing the image including eMail, Facebook, Twitter among many. Or by right clicking on the center of the photo a popup will appear and you can save the image as a file on your machine.
This option allows users to get at the photo’s EXIF data.
To do this fire-up Windows Explorer [or your PC’s equivalent]. Highlight the image you just saved in Explorer. Then rightmouse click at choose the Properties option in the menu that popped up. Properties has all the details of each file and the images too. The final screen shot shows that information.
So in this case we can see that LATimes photographer Wally Skalij was using a Nikon D4 at a slightly higher ISO of 2000. This setting along with the F/4 aperture allows Wally to stop the action with a 1/640 second shutter speed equal to the big lens in use. Also the depth of field is shortened. And now you know the photo smarts used to get a very compelling sports photo.
Go to the London2012.com Photo page:
Either choose from the daily galleries or for every Olympic sport in the drop down highlighted in yellow there are multiple galleries for each event. Choose from the many galleries available.
Then to get the images you want:
The fullscreen images are large so you may want to browse through the smaller images before switching to the fullscreen mode depending on your Web connection speed. Then download and/or share the photos you want m in the same fashion as for the LATimes photos. Typically, the fullscreen images are 1680×945 pixels plenty for your screen wallpaper.
Summary
The Olympic Games of 2012 were not only the social media games but also the most visually rich. In North America one could connect and follow[without commentary] any of the days events live on the Web. One could follow on Twitter and Facebook all the goings on. And Many websites provided live updates like the NYTimes for for big events like the US Womens and the Men’s Finals soccer games. But thanks to the LATimes and London2012.com there is also a wonderful legacy of photos and great images of the games as well. So visit the sites and find your own best Olympic Games images.