Behind the scenes at the Olympics – Canon heaven!

One of the things that I love to do at every Olympics, is to go behind the scenes of the Canon Professional Services (CPS) area to see all the goodies they have brought to support the photographers here at the Olympics. And once again, they brought a lot of stuff, including some new toys for us to play with. 

Jeff Cable has shot many of the recent Olympics. He has amazing coverage of the Paris Olympics, and it is well worth tuning into his blog for up-to-date photos and stories.

As you see when you watch TV, all of us photographers rely on really big lenses here, to get photos close to the action.  Each of these lenses that you see here costs thousands of dollars. These start around $6,000 and go all the way up to $20,000 (for the Canon 1200mm lens). You can see three of these on the second shelf from the bottom, far left. 

There is some serious glass (and money) in this room, and a lot of their inventory had already been loaned out on the day I visited, hence the empty slots. And I should mention that we can borrow anything we want at no charge, so you can bet that we try new things. 

For anyone into photography, this is like a candy store!

They also have a team of people repairing all the cameras and lenses we break while on the job. And let me tell you, I have seen people bang them into walls and drop them and it makes me cringe. But it is so awesome to know that this team is there to support us. And yes, Nikon and Sony have their crews in the Main Press Center too. 

It is honestly the only time I get to see the inside of a camera or lens, as I have no intention of ever opening mine myself.

I was taking the previous photos with my Canon R5 MKII loaner and my personal Canon RF 24-70mm lens. But I figured, hey, I am in a room full of lenses, let me try the new Canon RF 10-20mm wide angle lens. They let me grab one off the shelf and play. Damn, I LOVE that lens and need to get one. Super wide and almost no distortion!

Here is a whole shelf of Canon camera bodies. Almost all the ones you see towards the left are Canon R3 cameras, as you can see below.

Rows and rows of my favorite lenses.

It is not just the big glass. They have all the medium zooms, primes and wide angles as well. 

Wouldn’t it be fun to have this selection at home? 

I know what many of you are thinking. You are thinking “Do they have any Canon R1 cameras at the Olympics to loan?”

And the answer is YES! It looked like they had about 40 pre-production units and they are loaning them out to people for a 24 hour period, so that they can try it out. I am lucky in that I have two of them for the entire games.

They also had pre-production units of the Canon R5 MKII.   

I can tell you this. I wish I could keep my hands on the Canon R1 and Canon R5 MKII after the Olympics, because I am totally addicted to them now. If you saw the last blog post, with the incredible success I had with the new focus system, you know why. And I used both cameras this morning to photograph Simone Biles and it was incredible once again. And this time I was shooting at 40 frames per second.  Now I have a ton of images to go through, and share with you all. 

I hope you enjoyed another “behind the scenes” of the Olympics. Oh and how much do you all think this room is worth? 

We are only on the second full day of the Games and it seems like an eternity (not in a bad way – maybe more of a loss of sleep kinda way).  

I have so many more cool photos and stories to share with you.