Shooting Hoops

Ever wonder how sports photojournalists get those overhead shots at basketball games? Reuters senior photographer Lucy Nicholson explains it all on the Reuters blog. As you probably guessed, it involves mounting a remote-controlled camera on an overhead catwalk. Those cameras are now able to transmit images to off-site editors in real time, so game photos can get to media clients with great speed. At the recent NBA playoffs, Nicholson connected an overhead camera to a laptop that fed images into a software program accessible to editors in New York, Toronto and San Diego. This was the first time Reuters had tried this at an NBA playoff game, and "everything ran really smoothly," Nicholson writes.