I was joking with someone yesterday about the craziness of the Olympics, and the pressures that we are all under during the Games. We were talking about how the world has different time zones and maybe they should add another just for the Olympics. For the media here, there is absolutely no consistency to our eating and sleeping patterns and time is just different. When a bus is 10 minutes late at home, it usually is no big deal, but here at the Olympics, when you are under deadlines all the time, ten minutes seems like an eternity. And those deadlines can be really daunting.

When I first photographed the Olympics, there really was no such thing as social media and the deadlines were in the hours, not the minutes. I remember being in Beijing and people were saying, take your time getting us images because it is still in the middle of the night back home. But those days are long gone, and we live in a world of immediacy. The team does not want to wait for hours to get my photos, they want them as quick as I can deliver them. And I am not alone in this. The media here are either working for entities that expect images right away, or they are freelance and competing to get their images picked up by the different news outlets around the world, therefore earning them an income.

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