Flash photography takes on a new meaning for pictures taken of people and yachts in the BT Global Challenge.

No sooner has a film been processed at any of the ports of call than images are flashed across to Britain, where the world's media awaits.

An image takes seconds to travel thousands of miles via an ISDN line to ND Comtec, the company chosen by BT to manage the handling of pictures for the race. ND stands for Norsk Data, one of the three largest computer services companies in Britain.

Official photographer Mark Pepper takes his pictures, processes the film and scans them into a Nikon CoolScan. A file is created on Mark's computer using the industry standard software package Adobe Photoshop. The equipment follows him from port to port.

He attaches the caption information - mainly who's on the pic and where it was taken - using an IPTC format, the international standard for newspapers.

The scanned file is about five megabytes but this is reduced to about a tenth of that size ready for transmission by ISDN to the BT Global Challenge Picture Library base in Berkshire.

There, the image is entered onto a database along with the caption details. It is now in two sizes - the original, a thumbnail of about six kilobytes, and a larger preview size of approximately 30 kilobytes.

They are then placed onto the website, thus made available to the media and the public immediately. The media can download any of the pictures free and without copyright restrictions, as can the race sponsors, though members of the public are required to pay for prints.

Product manager Andy Vincent said: "We believe the BT Global Challenge race is the first event of this kind in the world to use this method of handling pictures."

In addition, the library also puts together packs of pictures and fizzes them down the wire to 25 leading national, international and regional newspapers plus the Press Association and Reuters.

The library also receives on-board footage from crew members and scans them into the system at Newbury. There are about 1,000 images on the system from Mark Pepper and 1,200 from crews.

Keith Martin