The day that the taxi dumped us in the wrong place and we had a yomp across the Rio Olympic Park to the Main Press Centre. ©Neil Turner, September 2016

By the time I leave here tomorrow I will have been in Rio de Janeiro for three weeks. In that time I have managed to take less than a dozen photographs – none of which are of any note whatsoever. I’ve been here as part of the OIS Photos team as one of two editors with my colleague Julia Vynokurova grabbing RAW files from a seemingly endless stream of FTP transfers from the four amazing sports specialists that have been here shooting the Paralympic Games for the Olympic Information Service.

Editing and captioning other people’s work is something that I do from time-to-time and it is a whole different skill set from shooting and editing your own pictures. It may sound obvious but I wasn’t there when the pictures were taken and so I have to judge them against criteria set down by the client and by each individual photographer on the team. They only send the pictures that they judge to be their best from the LCD on the back of the camera and so the editor has to assume that the photographer likes the picture. Some only send the cream whilst others send a wider selection to be narrowed down at the edit stage and you get to learn really quickly which camp each of them falls into.

Some photographers add voice captions to their pictures whilst others include frames of scoreboards, close up of competitor’s numbers – basically they need to do as much as they can to help the editors identify people, places and events so that captions can be as full and accurate as possible. It all happens really quickly and turning the photographs around looking their best consistently takes skill.

The photographers that we have been working with here are shooting with different cameras too: Bob Martin and Thomas Lovelock were using Nikon D5 bodies whilst Simon Bruty and Al Tielemans were using Canon EOS1Dx MkIIs. That means subtle but important differences with the file handling – although I don’t think that there has ever been so little difference between the way the two major manufacturers top-of-the-range DSLR’s RAW files have rendered.

The picture preparation, even with the truly challenging light that we have had both indoor and outdoors here, is in many ways the easier bit. Getting the captions right takes time – especially if there’s no voice caption and no obvious clue who is in the picture. We have had to turn detective more than once eliminating people from the list of who it could be. The schedules and results system provided by the Rio Media service has been great along with a bit of selective Googling have combined to get the captions done.

Then there’s distribution. Getting our entire edit onto the www.oisphotos.com website (Photoshelter has proved to be really valuable again) quickly with a selection out to seven different wire agencies even more quickly has meant some long hours and intensive work. It has been worthwhile. We have got quality Paralympic images out there being used in printed and online media all over the world day after day. Athletes and their families have Facebooked and Tweeted us and Paralympic associations, federations and national committees have used our pictures right across social media as well as on their websites.

The pictures are there for everyone to see on the OIS Photos website and any and all editorial use is free. Have a look at the site – I’m going to do just that when I get five minutes too.