No news organization has embraced the digital revolution faster than the Associated Press. Working from bureaus in 78 countries, AP photographers truly cover the world, and digital photography—from cameras to satellite photo transmission—is their medium. Their job is to take great news and sports pictures and get them to newspapers around the globe before deadlines close. To see how they do it, we went on assignment with a top AP shooter and his colleagues as they covered America's best Track and Field athletes competing for a spot on the U.S. Olympic team.

It's 4:00 in the afternoon on July 20—day 5 of the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials at Sacramento State University's Hornet Stadium. A trackside thermometer reads 113 degrees, but Associated Press photographer Doug Mills has other ways to gauge the heat. "Feel this," he says, pointing to the back of his camera, a Kodak DCS 520. "It burns your face. It's like taking pictures with a frying pan." 

Mills is sitting on the ground in the still photographer's "pit" about 50 ft. off the track's finish line with dozens of other photographers from Reuters, Sports Illustrated, Allsport, and an assortment of newspapers. The pit area is positioned so that athletes finishing races are running directly at the photographers stationed there. Mills is getting ready to shoot today's first event, the decathlon 100 meter dash, and he mounts a 600mm lens to one DCS 520 and a 70-210mm lens to a second one.

The runners take their marks for the first 100m heat, and Mills aims his 600mm at Chris Huffins in lane 7, the odds-on favorite to win the decathlon. When the starting gun sounds Mills hits his camera's shutter release and holds it down, letting the motor drive run, shooting with his lens aperture wide open to blur the background and with a very fast shutter speed to freeze the runner's motion. After Huffins covers the first 50 meters (in about 5 seconds), Mills quickly switches to the camera with the 70-210 lens and shoots Huffins crossing the finish line and reacting to his time. "I'm looking for a tight shot," Mills says of his photos of the sprinter. "Sometimes you get burned shooting that way—you cut off an arm or something—but I like to crop in the camera."

In the second 100m heat he's got a "special" to shoot. A special is a request from an AP member newspaper for photos of a particular athlete, usually a hometown hero who doesn't have national news value. In this case the Detroit News has asked for pictures of a decathlete named Phil McMullen, whom Mills shoots the same way he shot Huffins. In the third and final heat Mills uses only the 70-210, shooting the winner as he crosses the finish line.

Though he doesn't do so for this event, for some sprint races Mills will also rig up three or four remote cameras mounted on ground-level stands in front of him. He pre-focuses each of these on a different section of the finish line and triggers them with a foot switch while he follows the action with his handheld camera. "The hardest thing about sprint races is the preparation," he says. "Trying to think out all the scenarios. Who's going to win? What lane are they in? What if the two fastest guys are three lanes apart? How are you going to get them both?"

His thought process reflects the one overriding rule of a photojournalist's life—if it's newsworthy, he better come back with a shot of it. "Anticipation is the key," Mills says. "You have to know what the story is. What's news? Where is the action going to be?" For Mills, nothing could be worse than being in the wrong place when that action happens and finding out later that the guy from Reuters nailed it. 

At this event Mills has plenty of competition. He's one of several hundred journalists, including well over 100 photographers, who are in Sacramento to cover the Trials, widely considered the most important track meet held in the United States. The AP crew here includes Mills, three other staff photographers—Eric Risberg, Rich Pedroncelli, and Bob Galbraith—and photo editor Stephanie Mullen. Like nearly all AP staffers, the four photographers shoot with digital SLRs (an assortment of Kodaks and Nikons), and the pictures they take today will be transmitted to AP members and subscribers around the world, often within minutes of being captured. (The AP, the world's oldest and largest wire service, is a non-profit cooperative made up of U.S. newspapers and broadcasters. Non-members can pay subscription fees to access AP photos and news stories.)

Mullen and the four photographers have already met earlier in the day to decide who will shoot which event, trade information on shooting angles and positions, identify the day's important news stories, dare each other to eat the free sandwiches provided to the media, and go over a list of specials. Today, there are 13 specials, an unusually high number. 

Mills is scheduled to shoot the decathletes through their first four events. With the 100m now finished, he picks up his 600mm and 300mm lenses, some shorter lenses, and two DCS 520s, and then heads for the long jump pit across the stadium infield. On the way he hands his now full picture storage card (the AP calls them "disks") to his "runner", a high school student named Kayla Britton. She's been hired by the AP to ferry disks from Mills to Mullen, who has set up shop in the media tent, a dusty, crowded dump at one end of Hornet Stadium. 

At the long jump pit, the decathletes are taking their practice jumps, and Mills roams the outside of the track, testing vantage points through his viewfinder. "It's a hunt," he says. "You keep looking for an angle, for something unique, something different." He's searching for that special quality that separates a great picture from a merely competent news photograph. Maybe it's a background, or a color, or an unusual perspective. In sports, it might be a moment of peak action. Often, Mills says, it's the reactions of the athletes themselves. "There's so much natural emotion and drama in sports. That's what you try to catch."

Mills ends up on the roof of the corporate hospitality suites only to find a group of twenty photographers already there. Eric Risberg is one of them, and Mills doesn't want to duplicate his colleague's shots. (Risberg gets a good picture of Huffins from there, just before all the photographers are kicked out by track marshalls. "It was so hot on that roof," Risberg says later, "I couldn't keep the sweat out of my eyes. I couldn't see a thing. Thank God for autofocus.") Mills ends up back on the track shooting reaction shots for almost an hour, but doesn't get anything that thrills him.

At 6:00 Mills follows the decathletes to the other end of the stadium for the shot put. He uses the 600mm lens to shoot them very tight, looking especially for facial expressions. He likes the backlit view he has, but none of the pictures will end up getting "moved"—i.e. transmitted to the AP's New York headquarters. By 7:00 the event is finished, and Mills gives another full disk to Kayla Britton. He gets an empty one back from her (and his fourth Powerade of the day) and follows the decathletes on to the high jump area. 

Britton runs the disk back to the media tent where Mullen has already moved pictures of the 100m dash, the hammer throw, and the long jump for general distribution to all AP member newspapers. She's also sent the special that Mills shot of Phil McMullen running the 100m to the Detroit News in plenty of time for that paper's morning edition deadline.

Mills is his usual restless self at the decathlon high jump. "It always pays to keep moving," he says. "Even if you don't get something today, you learn something for the next time." He starts out on the infield, but, dissatisfied with the cluttered backgrounds he's getting, he moves by stages into the bleachers where the paying customers sit. Using his 600mm lens from there, he gets a nice shot of Huffins clearing the bar.

A little after 8:00, Mills moves to the outside of the track just before turn three to shoot an early round of the men's 400 meter hurdles. He uses his 300mm lens and shoots short motor drive bursts as the runners approach and then vault over a set of hurdles about 60 feet away from him. By 8:30 Mills is heading back to the finish line for the early rounds of the men's and women's 800 meter runs. The sun has nearly set by now, and the brutal heat has finally eased. The stadium lights are now dominant, and Mills has moved his camera's ISO from 200 to 500 to keep his shutter speeds above 1/250th of a second, the minimum speed for freezing sports action.

Mills has been shooting sports and news with digital cameras since the AP issued him a Kodak DCS 420 in the early 1990s. He first saw the DCS 520 model he now uses when he was asked to test a prototype at the 1997 Super Bowl. The camera was still officially a secret, and all its brand and model markings were hidden with black tape. In September, he will travel to Sydney, Australia for the 2000 Summer Games, his sixth Olympic assignment for the AP, the second that he'll shoot mainly with digital cameras.

The digital age, Mills says, has changed his job completely. The presence of a photo editor like Mullen, for instance, is unusual now. For most assignments AP photographers edit and transmit their own pictures. "We're everything now," Mills says. "A one-man band—photographer, editor, computer technician, librarian. I can't go anywhere without my laptop." But that's not a complaint, he says. "I love the freedom and responsibility of doing it myself. I know, when I'm shooting, what I can do as an editor. If it's a really rough situation, can I save it in Photoshop? It changes the way I look at every situation."

The 800m heats take more than an hour, and Mills shoots them all from the finish line while, on the infield, his AP colleagues are shooting the women's shot put, women's triple jump, and the men's javelin.

At 9:45 the men's 3000 meter steeplechase final is about to begin. Before it starts Mills mounts a 14mm lens to his third DCS 520, grabs one of his custom-built remote stands and a foot switch, and runs the length of the infield to the water obstacle. Earlier in the day, when the stadium was still empty, he had scouted out a good spot on the infield edge of the water pit and marked it with a blue adhesive dot. Now he mounts the DCS 520 to the stand and places the stand on the spot he marked. With the remote cord attached to the camera, he backs far enough away from the water pit to keep the track marshalls happy. Mills knows that the runners will only stay bunched together in the race's early laps, so he shoots them the first two times they come over the water obstacle. Then he picks up the whole apparatus and runs back to the finish line. Splashes from the runners landing in the water pit have soaked his $15,000 camera, but the unconcerned Mills simply wipes it off as he runs. He makes it back to the finish line in plenty of time to get shots of Pascal Dobert winning the race.

The final event of the night is the decathlon 400 meter run. Mills shoots this, too, from the finish line, using the 600mm lens to catch the athletes as they round the final turn and switching to the 70-210 a few seconds before they cross the finish line. 

It's now 10:15 and Mills has put in a full day's work. In 8 hours, much of that time in 100+ degree heat, he's photographed nine events, lugged more than 20 pounds of gear all over the stadium, and tripped his cameras' shutters more than 300 times, all in an effort to get sharp, well-exposed pictures of some of the world's fastest moving human beings. He can't imagine a better way to spend a day. "I've got the best job in the world," Mills says. "I don't care what anybody says."

By 10:45 the whole AP crew is collected back in the media tent. Mullen has just finished cropping, captioning, and moving the last pictures of the night. In total, she sent out 17 photos for general distribution and 11 specials. 

Mills and his compatriots catch the last media shuttle back to their hotel and slip into the restaurant in the lobby just before the kitchen closes. Tomorrow, at 2:00 p.m., it all begins again.
 

It's a twisty path from Doug Mills's camera to the front page of your morning newspaper. When Mills fills a disk with photos he slips it into a 6" x 9" envelope, writes his name on the outside, and hands it to his runner, Kayla Britton.

Britton takes the disk to the media tent where photo editor Stephanie Mullen is working two laptops simultaneously. Mullen is also receiving disks from the runner assigned to Bob Galbraith (Sacramento State journalism major Sarah Sieber) and from Pedroncelli and Risberg directly. She will look at over 1,000 thumbnails on any given day of the Trials.

Mullen sticks Mills's disk into the PC card slot of one of the laptops and takes a look at thumbnails of all his shots. When she sees one she likes she brings it into Photoshop for editing. Mullen begins by cropping the picture, then burns and dodges as needed, and adjusts brightness and white balance if necessary. The AP has strict rules against altering the content of any picture beyond these basic steps. (No "cloning out" distracting background elements or, say, pasting a handlebar mustache onto the Vice-President.) Mullen next re-sizes the photo, setting the long dimension at 10 inches and the resolution at 200 dpi, and then writes a caption for it in Photoshop's "File Info" window. (When an athlete's jersey number is obscured, as often happens, figuring out who the picture is of can require some fancy detective work on Mullen's part.) If the picture is a special, she notes the name of the newspaper that asked for it in the caption. Finally, she saves the image as a JPEG and transmits it over a standard 56kbps modem connection to the AP's national photo server.

In the AP's New York headquarters, another photo editor assesses the news value of the picture and decides how widely it will be distributed. The AP can send any given picture to an individual paper, to papers within a defined group such as a geographic region, or to all their members and subscribers worldwide. 

The vast majority of member newspapers automatically receive pictures via a direct satellite feed to a customized computer called an AP PictureDesk, which will download Mills's photo in 20 to 30 seconds. Editors at the paper are free to use the picture or not, depending on their needs and preferences. Total time from track to newspaper layout can be as little as 15 minutes.

The AP issues nearly all their staff photographers at least one, but usually two, professional digital SLR cameras and a Windows laptop computer (many with cell phone modems for uploading pictures from the road.) Each photographer also gets a variety of wide-angle, mid-range, and short telephoto lenses, often zooms. Long lenses—300mm and up—are normally kept at the bureaus, and photographers borrow them when an assignment calls for it. Digital shooters are supposed to have three to five 160mb picture storage cards ("disks" in AP jargon). But disks are the subject of some jealousy, and a lot of borrowing/theft appears to be going on ("No, you didn't loan me a disk three days ago—you must be hallucinating again"), so nobody would cop to how many they actually had.

Doug Mills - Cameras: 3 Kodak DCS 520s (a 2-megapixel digital version of the Canon EOS-1n), 2 Canon EOS-1n film cameras. Lenses: 14mm f/2.8, 17-35mm f/2.8, 28-70mm f/2.8, 3 70-210mm f/2.8s, 200mm f/1.8, 300mm f/2.8, 600mm f/4 (all Canon). An assortment of remote triggers (both hard-wired and Pocket Wizard radio units.)

Bob Galbraith - Cameras: 2 Nikon D1s. Lenses: 17-35mm f/2.8, 28-70mm f/2.8, 80-200mm f/2.8, 300mm f2.8 (all Nikon.)

Eric Risberg - Cameras: 2 Kodak DCS 520s. Lenses: 14mm f/2.8, 17-35mm f/2.8, 70-210mm f/2.8, 300mm f/2.8, 1.4x teleconverter (all Canon). 

Rich Pedroncelli - Cameras: 1 Kodak DCS 620 (a 2 megapixel digital version of the Nikon F5), 1 AP News Camera 2000 (a Nikon N90s made into a 1.3 megapixel digital unit by Kodak). Lenses: 17-35mm f/2.8, 80-200mm f/2.8, 300mm f/2.8 (all Nikon).