2026 Winter Olympics in Milan: All the pre-planning

We are now about 3 weeks from the start of the Winter Olympics in Milan, which means that starting Feb 6th many of you will be tuning in to watch the Games. The Olympics start soon, but the planning process for me started almost two years ago, and let me tell you, it is not like planning any other trip. I have gotten messages from many of you, asking questions about my lodging and transportation.  I chuckle when I read comments like "you might want to stay at this place" or "can't you take a helicopter from one location to another?" 

Let me start with the key differences between going to the Olympics and a visit to Milan any other time. 

Accreditation

Traveling to Italy for vacation would normally only require a passport and some money, but to work at the Olympics, the first step is to get accreditation (which happened about two years ago). This involves applications, approvals, security clearances and more. I should also mention that there are MANY different levels of accreditation for the Games. I always request the top-level photography pass that gives me access to all events.

Flights

Flights to the Games are almost always booked well in advance, with little room to make last minute changes. As it was this time around, I found out a couple of months ago, that the first ice hockey games start the day before the Opening Ceremony, so I had to change flights. If this had happened now, it would be very hard to find a good flight into Milan. I booked my original flight 10 months ago, as soon as the airlines would allow me to make a reservation. As for trying to get air transportation between the Olympic clusters, this is impossible for two reasons: Taking a helicopter or other air transportation would be impossibly expensive, and even if I had that kind of budget, the airspace will be locked down. I talked to a good friend of mine who has his own private jet and is used to easy travel wherever he goes, and even he could not get that kind of transport for the Olympics. Only select VIPs will be traveling by air between the different clusters. 

Hotels

If you or I were flying to Milan any other time, we could look up different hotels and easily pick one that fits our needs and our budget. During the Olympics, this same criteria does not exist. Firstly, most of the hotels in the city have been booked for years, and secondly the rates are going to be sky high. Much higher than most media people could afford. We are lucky, in that we have subsidized housing at certain hotels which had been designated for the press. These are under the Olympic Organizing Committee (IOC) control, and we cannot contact them directly for any help. So, when someone suggests a certain hotel in the city, I already know that this is not an option. 

About a year ago, I was granted access to the housing portal for these Games and selected my 3 top choices of press hotels. About a month later I got my allocation, and it was none of those three. I contacted the housing group and was able to get a different press hotel located near the main hockey arena. I had to pay them in full about 6 months ago, and now the rooming list and dates are locked in. I hope that the hotel is nice, but I never really know. If you have been reading the blog for a long time, you may recall some of the horrendous places I have stayed in the past, especially in Russia and Japan. I like to have a clean, comfortable and quiet room, but at the Olympics, the location is the most important factor since time is short, and I will be working crazy hours. 

Transportation

If I were visiting Milan for vacation, I would probably rely on a rental car, the train system or maybe Uber. I would be relaxed and in no hurry to get from one place to another. During the Olympics, time is compressed and every minute counts. I need to find the most efficient routes from the hotel to the Main Press Center (MPC) and venues, also remembering that I am transporting a lot of camera gear that is heavy and valuable. Driving my own vehicle is not an option since parking is difficult near any venue, there are also countless security checkpoints which would slow me down, and I could not use the Olympic lanes on the roads. FYI, almost every Olympic city will paint the Olympic Rings on certain lanes of any road leading to a venue, so that only official vehicles can use these. This allows us media to move between venues without much traffic. Then again, I am not sure if I will ever be on the roads, since I may be relying only on the train system. This is still unclear.

Packing

On a typical visit to Italy during the winter, I would put most of my packing effort on my clothing. Since I am not much of a fashion guy, this would be mostly casual clothing, jackets, shoes and packed in a carry-on bag. The weather in the city of Milan should be between 30F and 55F, so nothing too extreme. I will be spending a large amount of time inside ice rinks, so I need to plan for cold temperatures for most of every day.

At the Olympics, most of my stress level is in packing all my camera gear, laptops, accessories, and everything I need to get the photos for Team USA. The clothing is secondary (but still important). Now, instead of traveling with a carry-on bag and a camera backpack, I will likely have a large suitcase for my clothing, a medium sized camera backpack, and a large rolling camera bag. I will be posting a blog, talking about, and showing all my equipment (including some new gear!) right before I fly out.

More to come my friends.

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• Subscribe to the Jeff Cable Photography Blog by clicking HERE!

• Check out my upcoming photo tours to amazing places around the world. I have photo tours to Costa Rica, Peru, Galapagos, Africa, Iceland and more.

• If you are interested in purchasing ANY equipment, please click here to go to B&H Photo, as I get a referral from them if you enter this way. It does not change the cost to you in any way, but it helps me keep this blog up and running.
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2026 Winter Olympics in Milan: The Challenges!!

Well folks, we are now about one month from the start of the Winter Olympics in Milan and there are a lot of challenges ahead, both for me personally and on a much larger scale. In this blog post I am going to share with you all, some of those challenges and how I plan to overcome them (or not).

First, lets start with the biggest challenge of all, the locations which are spread out all over the place, more than any other Olympics ever. This will be the first Olympics that I have covered where I will not be able to cover a wide variety of sports. In the city of Milan, there will be ice hockey, figure skating, short track speed skating, and long track speed skating. Everything else is in Cortina, Valtellina, Val di Fiemme or Anterselva which is between a 4 hour to 12 hour drive each way. This means that there is no way for me to cover any other sports other than what is in Milan. The Opening Ceremony is in Milan but even the Closing Ceremony is hours away in Verona. I will likely miss that as well. 

Then there are the ice hockey arenas. As I have done since 2010, I will be the official photographer for all ice hockey games for the men and women of Team USA. This means that I will be staying at a press hotel in the city center, as close as I can be to the main arena. But there are two hockey arenas in Milan which are on opposite sides of the city. This means that any games played in the second arena will be tougher to get to, and if there are men's and women's games that are at similar times, it will be virtually impossible for me to cover both. In Russian, I could walk from one arena to the other in 5 minutes or less. That won't be happening this time around. I will have to work in both venues and can only rely on public transportation to get around. Just like Paris, there are no press buses available for us in Milan. 

The even bigger is that the Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena, which is the primary venue for hockey is still NOT completed yet. This is really hard to believe, knowing that the planning committee in Milan has had ten years to build everything out. 

Under normal circumstances, the arena would be completed at least 6 months in advance and we would have test events take place to make sure everything is working just right, but that has not happened yet! I have heard that there will be test events in the next week or so, but that is cutting it WAY too close for most peoples comfort. Remember, this is the first time in more than a decade that the NHL players are allowed to represent their home countries. That is a really big deal. They will also be playing on ice that is irregular in size (not NHL size and not International size either).  This is so strange, but a real fact. And lets not forget the women, who are outstanding hockey players, who ultimately will be the guinea pigs, since their competition starts before the men. The first women's game for USA Hockey actually happens the day BEFORE the Opening Ceremony. That would be Feb 5th, which is not too long from now. 

Assuming they get the ice in place and all the seating done, I then wonder what will be skipped. This brings back memories of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, which were played in the "not so finished" Bolshoy Ice Dome. It looked great on television, but I remember staircases that were unusable (missing many of the stairs) and a hole in the ceiling of the press bathroom where I could see the feet of the spectators in their seats. So this leads me to wonder not just whether the ice surface and spectator areas will be completed, but what about the press rooms, underground bathrooms, internet wiring and everything else that we rely on? 

This venue is supposed to be running every day and all day with men's and women's hockey games. 

Another interesting challenge for me will be resetting my body clock. Sure, it is common to handle this when traveling to work in another country, but these games are going to be played at really crazy hours. Since NBC wants to air the USA Hockey games live in the US, many of the games will start at either 9pm or as late as 11pm and run until 2am. This means that for some games I will be working on images in the press room  until 4am or 5am, and then have to make my way back to the hotel using the trains. I sure hope they have black-out blinds at the hotel, but I am guessing that this will not be the case. Time to order a sleep mask on Amazon.

All press hotels are required to feed us breakfast, and this is the one meal where I usually fuel up for the day, but I don't think I will be awake during the breakfast hours. Maybe I can arrange a breakfast box each day but I have no idea if that will be possible. Most likely not. I know...these are small problems, but during the Olympics, time is precious and knowing that I have "known place and time" to get food is a bigger deal than you might think.

The good news is that I will be there and doing what I love, and the bad news is the unknown for which I am about to encounter. I guess this is going to be interesting for all of you as I blog daily and share my experiences (good and bad) once again. 

Upcoming blog posts will be covering the equipment I am bringing, my pre-Olympic preparations and more.

Stay tuned my friends!

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• Subscribe to the Jeff Cable Photography Blog by clicking HERE!

• Check out my upcoming photo tours to amazing places around the world. I have photo tours to Costa Rica, Peru, Galapagos, Africa, Iceland and more.

• If you are interested in purchasing ANY equipment, please click here to go to B&H Photo, as I get a referral from them if you enter this way. It does not change the cost to you in any way, but it helps me keep this blog up and running.
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A WHOLE BUNCH of favorite images from my last trip to Costa Rica!

In November, I spent about 3 weeks in the rain forest of Costa Rica leading my 15th and 16th photo tours down there and it was awesome. Both groups were full of fun people who got along famously, and I was lucky enough to be with all of them.

As always, as I am teaching everyone, I am able to get photos for myself (although this is always secondary to my guests getting their shots). In this blog post, I thought I would share many of my favorite photos from both photo tours. This also gives you an idea of how many photo opportunities we have down there, and also shows the variety of what we see during the tour. This is way more images than I normally include in one blog post, but I thought it would be fun for you all to see them at one time. 

(Note: after uploading all these, I noticed that I accidentally watermarked them with a 2024 date. That should be 2025.)

All these photo are in chronological order as they were taken, and almost all of them were captured with the Canon R5 Mark II and RF 100-300mm lens with either the 1.4x or 2x teleconverter.

I have photographed many Scarlet Macaw, but usually don't like capturing them from behind. But in this case, they were flying out over the marina and I loved the scene.

This is a photo I posted on social media as one of the favorites from the first tour, as we came across this mother and baby Howler monkey curled up together in perfect light.

This parrot was flying by and I grabbed a quick shot.

On our day of close-up shooting, we had a great time photographing the Red-eyed tree frogs. Since I have photographed them so many times, my goal now is to capture them differently than in the past. I stood back and shot this little guy with the RF 100-300mm lens with the 1.4x teleconverter. A little wider than usual but I like this composition.

It was a challenge to keep the focus point on the face of this Eyelash viper.

As we were driving back from the macro place, we saw this Fire-billed Aracari in a tree. We all set our face detection on the bird and, just after doing that, it flew right at us! What a cool perspective.

Since the introduction of "pre-continuous shooting" on the Canon cameras, I now love teaching people how to use this feature to capture birds doing more than just standing on a branch. 

We would put our focus on them and wait for them to jump or fly, and then hammer the shutter.

Since I had recently photographed the Blue-footed Boobies and Red-footed Boobies in the Galapagos Islands, it was fun to capture yet another species to add to my collection, the Brown-footed Boobies in Costa Rica.

I liked the symmetry of these two Pelicans who flew by us during our dolphin tour.

Speaking of dolphins, we saw these two Spotted dolphins following the wake of our boat. Since these are my favorite animals, I always LOVE capturing photos of them.

It was our day off (during the first tour) and I was standing on the balcony outside my room, and saw these two Toucans hanging out on a tree just across from me. It was fun to capture images at their same level.

This Iguana made an appearance at the chocolate plantation.

We were all trying to get good shots of a sloth that was up in a tree, when one of our guides spotted this beautiful snake hanging out in a pile of leaves. We all had fun capturing the pretty colors of this subject.

We also had a Woodpecker in the trees above us.

The next morning, we were all having breakfast and saw a pack of Squirrel monkeys jumping from one tree to another. It was early in the morning and there was not much sunlight yet, so I thought that the only way to capture them in action was to motion pan them. High risk and high return! I was at ISO 5000 and still only at 1/100th of a second. I took a lot of photos, and managed to capture 3 or 4 that were sharp on the monkeys. 

These White-face monkeys made me laugh.

Here is an American White Ibis hanging out on a branch.

We even had a rare sighting of an owl buried in a tree, with his eyes open.

We have raccoons back home, but until this last trip, I had not seen many in Costa Rica.

I loved the color of this Caterpillar that was hanging out on a branch next to the resort lobby as my first group was about to fly out. This was later become a Gypsy Moth.

I did not take too many photos during my 3 day break between photo tours, but I saw this Crested Caracara from the balcony of my room and could not resist capturing an image.

We saw endless amounts of monkeys on the property on this last trip. This White-faced monkey was very protective of it's apples.

This monkey was not far from the restaurant at the resort, but it had no need to order, as it was already enjoying a snack.

I never get tired of photographing hummingbirds.

As we started the next photo tour, one of the first things we saw were some Cattle egrets, young and old.

This was a great chance to teach the new group about exposure compensation, as these white birds flew in front of a dark background. It was critical to set the exposure of the camera to -1 or even -2 to keep the whites of the bird from being over exposed.

Two more White-faced monkeys keeping watch over each other.

A Squirrel monkey just hanging out, literally.

I photographed the phosphorescent bugs for the first time a couple of years ago and still enjoy doing that. 

This was my first "action shot" of one of these bugs. :)

I have been to the beaches in Costa Rica so many times and never really photographed the crabs. After grabbing this image, I realize that I was missing something cool, and will encourage guests to get a shot like this in the future.

We were really lucky to come across about 20 Scarlet macaw that were flying back and forth to get palm nuts from a particular tree. This gave us a chance to capture them in flight.

This is one of the Macaw flying off of the palm tree.

This is now one of my favorite photos of a Scarlet macaw. Perfectly sharp with a palm nut in the mouth. This was taken with the Canon R5 Mark II and the RF 100-300mm lens withthe 2x teleconverter attached.

Here is yet another shot from the balcony of my room. A Fire-billed Aracari moving from tree to tree.

We don't always see the King Vultures on our tours, but this time we did.

We even saw a young Ant eater walking around in the grass. Another first for me.

I used to call our day photographing the frogs and snakes our "macro day" but some of my guests suggested that I call it "close-up day" instead since so many of us now use long lenses to capture the little creatures. Why have things changed? Because up until about 6 years ago, the long lenses would not let us focus within a couple of feet of our subject, but the news lenses do this easily.

More photos of the Red-eye tree frog. A very different look from the photo you saw previously in this blog.

More hummingbirds in flight...

...and more Eyelash vipers.

I love photographing colorful subjects and the Red-legged Honeycreeper had lots of color.

On the second dolphin excursion, we were all capturing images of the birds as they flew by. I focused on this Great Blue Heron as it flew low to the water. It was not until I was going through my images on the MacBook Pro, that I saw the fish jumping in front of the Heron. A lucky capture.

Sometimes we have to wait an hour or more to find the dolphins in the gulf, but on this day we saw them almost immediately. I had our boat captains crank up the motors so that the dolphins would swim in our wake. We all got really nice images of the dolphins once again.

We were all thrilled to see this mother and youngster jumping together!

There are always turtles sunning themselves in the Crocodile pond. On this morning, we had good light and nice reflections.

More Yellow-throated Toucans in flight. This one was captured at 1/400th of a second...

...and this one was captured at 1/100th of a second as I motion panned it as it flew by.

This White-nosed Coati visited us for breakfast one morning...

...and stuck his tongue out at me. :)

This Fire-billed Aracari was sitting high up in a tree, almost at the exact height of the building I was staying in. I grabbed my camera and went to the rooftop and took this photo with it perfectly framed with leaves, and in nice even light.

On the second photo tour, I changed things up and added an extra "close-up day" of shooting at a new location, which allowed us to capture different species from the first day.

I really liked the color of this Cricket, and the position it was in. 

This was another first for me. This is a Stick insect which is really hard to see when it is closed up. A bunch of us were capturing images of it, when it was closed and looking like a stick, when it opened up and flew away.

I have always been intrigued by Tarantulas, and was happy to see that the local guide had found one for us to shoot. 

A couple more Squirrel monkeys that were mating seconds before I took this photo.

Lastly, a shot of a Two-toed Sloth that was nice enough to come down from a tree for us.

I still have room in some of my 2026 trips to Costa Rica (as well as the bear trip in Minnesota, Iceland, Peru, the Galapagos) and new 2027 dates for Costa Rica. Take a look at my tour page and let me know if you are interested in any of these upcoming trips.

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• Subscribe to the Jeff Cable Photography Blog by clicking HERE!

• Check out my upcoming photo tours to amazing places around the world. I have photo tours to Costa Rica, Peru, Galapagos, Africa, Iceland and more.

• If you are interested in purchasing ANY equipment, please click here to go to B&H Photo, as I get a referral from them if you enter this way. It does not change the cost to you in any way, but it helps me keep this blog up and running.
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