The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics is fiercely competitive, and it is not only the athletes who are busy on the Olympic games, but also for those sports photojournalists, the arena is also their arena. In order to capture the "decisive moment", many photographers and journalists have been preparing for a long time, of course, a variety of top-notch photographic equipment is absolutely indispensable. The quadrennial Olympic Games have become a feast for the equipment party.
In the sports arena has always been the dominant position of SLR cameras, until the emergence of mirrorless cameras, is breaking this situation, especially before the Winter Olympics, Sony, Canon, Nikon three major manufacturers have launched their own mirrorless camera flagship models before the Winter Olympics, and during the event for sports photographers from all over the world to provide a full range of protection services.
The rise of mirrorless cameras broke the SLR landscape
Compared to SLR cameras, mirrorless cameras are smaller, lighter, faster, and can shoot better videos. They also have some unique features, such as electronic viewfinder (rather than optical viewfinder), silent shooting and focus peaks, just in the preliminary round of this Winter Olympics, a photographer's Sony Alpha 1 camera has been "unveiled" on foreign social media - this camera accidentally left the hand, under the action of gravity along the long snow slope rolled more than 60 meters. After checking that the camera's hood and LCD screen were damaged, but the fuselage was not in serious trouble, and was repaired by the Sony service station for an hour, the vignette inadvertently played a small advertisement for the ruggedness of Sony Alpha 1.
Source: NBC
In the venue of this Winter Olympic Games, it is necessary to face the influence of special environments such as low temperature freezing, heavy wind and snow, and indoor and outdoor temperature differences at any time, so sports photography has higher requirements for photography equipment.
Photo: Wei Zheng
The advantages of mirrorless cameras in sports themes are great, and the maximum continuous shooting speed of the Sony A1 full-frame micro single used this time can reach 30 frames per second. This is very important for sports photojournalists. It helps us to more easily capture key moments, such as some key moments in the game, decisive moments, and the reporter can capture more details of them. At the same time, the mirrorless camera used now, with the real-time tracking autofocus system can make the focus more "flexible", it can be locked after the focus of the subject, no matter where the subject moves to the frame, it maintains continuous tracking, which makes the photographer's shooting and composition intention more accurate, without re-cropping too much, or re-cropping in the later stage. This not only reduces the workload of the photographer, but also preserves the output of large files as much as possible, which will have more benefits for the improvement of the quality of future works.
For sports photojournalists, the lightness of the photographic equipment is important. The lightness and performance of the mirrorless camera will surely replace the SLR camera, and the Sony mirrorless camera occupies a huge advantage in this field and is the "priority king" in the mirrorless field.