With 98 different sports events to cover over 16 days, the photographers covering the Sochi Winter Olympics for photo agency Getty Images certainly have their work cut out. Getty is dispatching 69 photographers to snap the games from every imaginable angle, as well creating panoramic and gigapixel imagery. Wired.co.uk caught up with one of the agency's award-winning sports photographers Adam Pretty to find out what challenges lie ahead.

Pretty began his sports photography career under the guidance of Craig Golding and Tim Clayton—two photographers working at the Sydney Morning Herald. After seeing an exhibition by the duo at the age of 16, which Pretty says "blew me away," he asked them for advice. They gave him feedback on his photography and, after he dropped out out of university, helped him to begin to develop his own style when he got a job alongside them on the paper.

"In photography in general, there are millions of ways you can approach it, and always, from an early age, I didn't want to recycle other people's ideas—that was drummed into me by the two guys I was working for and with at the Herald. They really forced me to become original and look at things in my own way," he says.

From his experience, a basic ability to shoot action and good reflexes are the primary technical skills sports photographers need to focus on developing, but most important of all is having "an original perspective".

"It's just harder to get noticed as a photographer if you are producing similar work to your competitors. Unless you're consistently the best of the best at your thing, if it is the same, it is hard to stick your head up.

Pretty has worked hard to distinguish himself from the pack, developing his own style that has seen him win several major international photography awards.

"I won't necessarily be at the peak of the action or the big news moment. That's definitely important in sport—you have to capture the winning goal when someone crosses the line, the celebration—but when you're not shooting something like that, there's opportunity to experiment and try and do something your own way," he says.

Trying to juggle covering the event as well as capturing the money shot is a challenge, but also "part of the fun," says Pretty. When he arrives at an event, he'll see where all the other photographers have congregated and head in the other direction, often looking for a spot offering a background against which he could capture an amazing picture, should something happened right in front of it.

"It's a little bit high risk, but then if something does happen, just shoot for that exact moment, rather than try and cover the whole event as such. Just target what picture you're trying to get. I think that's worked for me."

Pretty moved to Getty in 1998 has now photographed five Olympic Games. During Sochi he'll be roaming all over, covering everything from the luge and bobsled, to the ski jumping and snowboarding, as well as the Nordic activities, ice skating and biathlon. He describes the kit he has taken with him to Sochi as "fairly basic," despite it including six lenses, two camera bodies, and a teleconverter.

"I haven't shot snowboarding for a long time, so I'm really excited to shoot that, but then often you get the best pictures from the offbeat kind of sports like the biathlon or something where you don't expect it," he says.

In order to be able to put a creative spin on things, the events shot outside are likely to provide the best opportunities for him to capture to something unique. "Sports where you have a little bit more freedom are ones where you're on the mountain—where they're not locked into a track. Then again sometimes with a track you can get some amazing lighting situations."

With track events like the luge he says, the best thing to do is to "get there pretty early and walk the whole course if you can and then try and find—because you can only really do one angle on that setup—that one best angle."

"Usually you'll try to do a pan, with a little bit of slow shutter speed to try and perfect what you're doing at the speed that they're moving at, and just have that ready to go when the real competitors start going down," he explains.

The photography team has already arrived in Sochi and will be spending time getting to know the venues and the slopes so they can get a better idea of how they will shoot the various events. Going to practice sessions is always helpful if you can make it, says Pretty, although this will be hard for him on this occasion as he will be roaming so widely between events. Each venue will also have its own dedicated Getty photographers, so he can ask them for positioning tips. He likes to try and keep himself fresh though by not looking at what other photographers have done unless he is really struggling—"there might be one location where you have to hike up for an hour or two," he says.

"I think preparation makes all the difference, but then spontaneity is amazing too—you can walk in and go 'wow!' and see something different straight away. It's a mixture of things. I'll try not to look at the website if I can so I don't get influenced, and that helps with your originality, because once you've seen something you cannot take that back."

In the past, photographers were unlikely to see each other's photos for days, but trying to keep things fresh when photos appear on the Internet almost the moment they're shot is increasingly a challenge and can be "stressful," he says. "Now in the digital age, a unique angle is only unique for about five minutes until someone sees it online and then everyone can go there."

Aside from being in Russia itself (and we've already seen what hassles some journalists have been going through), one of Pretty's main concerns is whether the communications in the country will be up to scratch. "London was amazing, just because the communication was so good, and that was a fantastic Olympics for pictures," he says, but he remarks that otherwise, nearly every Olympics he covers is harder than the last due to more security and restrictions.

That said, Getty will have laid 20km of cable to create a state-of-the-art fiber optic network that will connect all the key photo positions inside the venues directly back to the Getty Images office in the Main Press Center. With the VLAN connections on the mountains, the photographers will be able to dump the contents of their memory cards onto their laptops, and they'll automatically be back with the editor a minute or so later. Not having to edit your own work makes "a huge difference in workflow", says Pretty. "And then having the high-speed connection is great," he adds.

"When it's working it's fantastic, so hopefully it all goes well with the Internet connection."

Then, of course, there's the weather. Coming from Australia, Pretty isn't necessarily suited to the chilly climes of the ski slopes. Sochi should fairly temperate compared to some events he's covered previously (he describes the -35 conditions during the World Cup skiing in Canada as "treacherous—it was really hard to work"). That doesn't necessarily mean he's in for an easy ride at Sochi though. Along with his camera equipment, Pretty will be kitted out with cold weather gear, including a big jacket and crampons.

"It's icy, it's dangerous, so it's much harder than turning up to a football game definitely. I'm also pretty unfit at the moment, so it's quite challenging to get into position, and that can be hard.

"In America and Canada you're allowed to snowboard on the courses, but in Europe and Russia, you're not allowed to snowboard, so I'll be doing a lot more hiking. It'll be harder on the lungs," he says, sounding pained.

So you want to become a sports photographer?

Here are the six camera accessories Adam Pretty would recommend you invest in if you had unlimited pennies to spend on equipment: