Two days in Sochi so far aside, I have never covered an Olympic Games before so, like many others, I have been reliant on television and images for my Olympic memories.

This was a theme explored in an insidethegames blog last week by my colleague Mike Rowbottom who described how for him Games of the past are a "slide show" of iconic images and recollections.

After the splendour of Russia's Torch Relay and its trips to the North Pole, Outer Space, Lake Baikal and Mount Elbrus - not to mention the recent influx of visuals documenting the arrival of athletes in Sochi - we expect this fresh onslaught of iconic images to continue over coming weeks.

But what of the photographers who actually take these images? What are their motivations and challenges and how has their job changed over time?

I must admit that, during my time as a journalist, I have not paid too much attention to their plight and the interaction that has occurred has tended to involve a photographer's frustrated protests after a snapping opportunity was prevented by my uncaring, if innocent, intrusions.

One particular example of this arose during the Flame Lighting Ceremony in Ancient Olympia last year when I, along with one journalistic colleague, managed to arrive at the crucial moment to photograph the handover of the Torch to ice hockey superstar Alexander Ovechkin and in doing so position myself directly in front of photographers who had spent all morning patiently waiting to ensure a perfect view.

There is also a slightly dismissive element on our part I feel due to the fact that we manage to not only take photos but write articles as well. But the validity of any superiority complex is of course nonsense and there is a world of difference between taking photos on a camera phone and taking them with the volume, precision and complexity of a Getty Images cameraman.

Besides, I struggle to believe that a professional photographer would spend half an hour baffled at a camera showing a black screen only for it to turn out that a piece of paper was blocking the lens - as the insidethegames team did en route to Sochi...

Photographers will be there for every second of Sochi 2014, as they were the for the Olympic Torch departure for Outer Space last year ©AFP/Getty Images


Luckily an opportunity arose to speak to Getty photographer Alexander Hassenstein to understand more about how exactly this advanced world operates.

Hassenstein joined the Berlin-based sports paper Deutsches Sportecho in 1990 after completing a classical traineeship in photography. He has since worked for Bongarts, as well as Getty, and has covered 11 Olympic Games and three FIFA World Cups alongside a multitude of other events - receiving numerous awards along the way.

He will be focusing on Alpine skiing in Sochi as part of 69 strong Getty team who will be uploading more than 2,000 pictures per day.

"In terms of sport nothing has changed during my career - it is still about athletes, competition and Olympic values", Hassenstein explains to insidethegames with a kind of youthful enthusiasm that you would have assumed nigh on 25 years in the industry would have quelled. "But in terms of photography there has been huge progress."

After starting with frames and slides and having to wait overnight before looking at prints in the morning, Getty are now "leaders sending pictures around the world immediately".