Best Getty Images from the 2024 Paris Olympics: Week 1

Between the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the 2024 Paris Olympics, Getty Images will have a team of more than 80 photographers shooting as many as 5 million images. Those breathtaking photos are then run through a team of more than 40 editors, live-editing remotely from offices in London.

It's a massive undertaking, a complex amalgamation of human ingenuity and artistic vision with radical technology — top-of-the-line lenses, remote cameras, robotic and underwater cameras and more.

The results are breathtaking and help bring all the emotion of excitement of the games to people around around the world. FanSided is lucky enough to be partnering with Getty throughout these games and each week several photographers will be sharing some of their favorite photos with us and explaining the stories behind them.

Here are Steph Chambers, Sarah Stier and Patrick Smith sharing what they captured in the first week. Stay tuned for a full round up of all the best images from the games after the closing ceremonies.

Steph Chambers

The Paris 2024 Olympics is my second time photographing table tennis. During the Tokyo 2020 Games, I covered all 14 days of competition so I am now quite familiar with the sport and some of the athlete's tendencies, which can come as an advantage when anticipating action. Of course, a major component I challenge myself with is patiently waiting for the ball with the Olympics logo to be upright and visible.This can be very tedious! Oftentimes, I don't get lucky, but when I do it's quite rewarding.

Another challenging part is the backgrounds aren’t always the cleanest. The key is to find a spot where the light falls off enough to create a dark background away from referees, LED boards, and other distracting components. The venue has field of play positions so you can get fairly close to the athletes along the sides of the table. I prefer to sit on the ground instead of designated photo benches because the lower my line of sight is, the cleaner my backgrounds become. However, crouching all day for four sessions of table tennis is quite painful. 

The sport can be quite repetitive, which can be a disadvantage and advantage depending on how you see it. The disadvantage is that the photos can look the same if you’re not pushing yourself by finding new ideas. But the advantage is that you see an interesting serve or reaction many times over. This allows for multiple tries to nail your idea.

Sarah Stier

I have primarily been shooting aquatics at the Paris La Defense Arena and Aquatics Centre covering swimming and diving events and medal ceremonies. The Olympic Games brings together these incredible athletes to compete on the world’s biggest stage–providing all the action, but also pure emotion. It's unique to get to witness and capture such great emotions in one place, seeing the determination, joy, pride, resilience, exhaustion, agony, heartbreak, among others, of teams and athletes competing for their countries at such a high level.

Working on a team of photographers for aquatic events, especially swimming, allows for us to capture so many different angles and perspectives of the competition from above and under the surface. I am always confident if I don’t think of something or am not in the best position for a moment, someone else on the the team will have it covered. This allows us to really get creative and use the water, action and emotion to create compelling imagery.

Here are two of my favorite photos and moments so far.

In this photo, Gretchen Walsh is just popping out of the water on the second length of the 100m Butterfly Final. This is a sprint event, and I feel that this photo freezes her face in such a way that you can almost feel the power that she is bringing to the surface as she breaks out of the surface.

Originally I was hoping to get a photo that captured a "bubble" of water over her head just before the breakout, but in this moment, which is just slightly later, I like the way the water just wraps around her face and back. Despite being a moment of peak action, I love the delicacy that the water draping over her adds to the image. I knew Gretchen would be a great opportunity to make a photograph like this as she has a really unique stroke and incredible power — she is the world record holder in this event.

We knew going in that Leon would be a big story of the Olympics — he is quickly becoming one of the best swimmers we've seen in a while, and being French himself, he has the whole crowd behind him. During his race in the Men's 400m Individual Medley final, I wanted to try to make photos that were more creative rather than more traditional, stock swimming photos.

When he began the second length of breaststroke, I saw that he and the competitors behind him were forming a nice pattern each time they came up to breathe. You don't have a lot of time to make this picture because each athlete has their own pace, and so while they may look like they are in sync one moment, they will quickly fall out of sync again. I saw the pattern forming, tried to get it, but missed. I kept watching and eventually, they came back in sync one more time which made for a nice image that showed Leon in the lead, with a formation of swimmers behind him, all within the rule of thirds. 

Patrick Smith

During the Paris Olympics, I’ll primarily be covering athletics, otherwise known as track and field. But before that starts, I was assigned to cover a few days of fencing which I was excited about! As an American, we don’t photograph fencing on a regular basis, so going into a global, major event like the Olympics, I had to quickly relearn the athletes and rules of the sport to ensure I was capturing the action, emotion and peak moments happening throughout the competition. As a photographer, the internal memory is always sparked with joy when we realize how amazing this sport is to photograph.

What’s unique about photographing fencing is the precision of it. Much like photography, the sport is about the decisive moment. It's when to attack or when to push the shutter button. Because of this, it makes the sport interesting to shoot. Because of this, the approach is much different from the typical sports I cover.

While in many ways like an indoor sport, say basketball, where you're confined to a spot, fencing allows for more freedom in creativity. We're looking for the exact moment a point is scored. We're looking for a big picture to help tell the story of the environment. And what is most unique, is that every point draws a lot of emotions which always translates into compelling imagery. The atmosphere of fans, especially for the French at this year’s Games, also builds the energy in that when a final comes, everyone can feel the tension. 

A challenge more generally with sport can be learning a venue. What backgrounds work? Where can one go and not go? What’s a fresh vantage point or angle? It’s all hard work that separates us from our competition.

Here are two my favorite photos from the Paris Olympics so far.

The first is of the venue — Grand Palais. This venue is an absolute gem of a venue. Boasting beautiful, high ceilings it certainly gives off a grand view. Deciding to a risk, I used a super wide fish shy that creates a circular-like image to really showcase the size and majestic view, with the athletes in mid-competition.

This second image is all about Mohamed Elsayed of Team Egypt. He went absolutely wild after winning the Men's Épée Individual Bronze Medal Bout. Anyone can feel his emotion. It may have only been bronze, but he was points away from walking away with nothing and you can feel his joy through the screen and how hard work pays off on the world’s biggest stage.