Warmth seekers: superb thermal pictures from the Winter Olympics | Winter Olympics 2026

While most photographers are striving to ‘freeze’ movement utilizing conventional cameras on the Winter Olympics this month, a inventive trio from the photograph company Getty Images are in search of one thing rather more sudden: warmth.

Equipped with compact thermal-imaging cameras – the sort usually reserved for scientific or industrial functions – Pauline Ballet, Ryan Pierse and Héctor Vivas have been crafting eerie photos of athletes on the slopes of Cortina and within the rinks of Milan. The Olympians’ our bodies are rendered as spectral yellows and reds, whereas the ice and snow round them seems both cyan or indigo.

“As visual artists, we’re drawn to photography as a form of art that allows us to be expressive, creative and experimental,” Ballet says of their work. “Thermal cameras capture the infrared radiation emitted by bodies, thereby revealing heat, muscular effort and the thermal exchanges between the athlete and the environment in which they perform. It’s both a documentary tool and a poetic medium.”

In truth, every digital camera has two lenses – one thermal and one photographic – permitting the operator to provide a curious foreshadowing impact if each pictures are mixed (greatest seen within the luge and free-skating pictures beneath).

“[You] can see the body in motion and its delayed thermal imprint, like a memory of the gesture,” Ballet says. “It creates a visual dialogue between the visible and the invisible.”

So how difficult is it to compose and shoot thermal pictures, in comparison with conventional images?

“It’s a bit like learning photography all over again, which is fun,” Ballet says. “The main difference lies in the visual language. In classical photography we work with light, composition and fast or slow shutter speeds; in thermal imaging we work with temperature, energy dissipation, colour and the thermal traces of movement.

“We are obviously confronted with several limitations, which we play with. It’s impossible for us to choose settings such as the exposure speed, aperture and focal length.

“Also, there are technical constraints such as a delay between pressing the shutter and the image being captured. This pushes us to reinvent composition, since our visual reference points change completely.”

The trio are additionally experimenting with a number of different inventive tasks on the Games together with infra-red photography, vintage Graflex cameras and digital composites.

Vivas mentioned the Graflex cameras have been “paying tribute to the type of camera that would have been used 70 years ago when Cortina previously hosted the Games in 1956”. But, in a contemporary twist, “[our] cameras have been adapted to record images on smartphones, enabling live transmission of the content captured”.

“It’s exciting to be part of Getty’s special projects team,” Ballet provides. “We can’t wait to share the finished set at the end of the Games.”