A view of the city skyline from inside the Olympic Stadium. Thousands of high-resolution photos documenting the stadium’s progress were stored on Seagate hard drives.

Affectionately known as the “Bird's Nest” for its nest-like lattice structure, the Beijing National Stadium is nearing completion in time for the 2008 summer Olympic Games. Seagate is helping document every step of the stadium’s construction.

Among those who've made the “Bird's Nest” their home—at least until the stadium is finished—are thousands of workers from all over China. Most of the workers have lived away from their homes for a year or more in order to complete the stadium on time. The stadium covers 258,000 square metres and will hold more than 90,000 people. Construction work began on 24 Dec, 2003.

Digi-Life, one of China's top photography and lifestyle publications, assembled some of the country's most prominent photographers to capture the progress of the stadium—as well as the lives of the workers who built it. Seagate provided the magazine with several of its 750-GB FreeAgent™ Pro storage solutions and Barracuda® 7200.11 desktop hard drives that deliver up to 1 TB of capacity, to enable these important digital images to be captured, shared, stored and protected.

The magazine's photographers photographed the stadium from multiple angles, and also shot brief videos documenting the workers' lives. After a long day of shooting, Digi-Life editor-in-chief Lu Jing could relax, knowing his team’s photos were secure inside Seagate drives.

“In order to capture the highest quality images of the stadium's design, I opted for a high-definition shooting mode that automatically required large storage capacities,” Lu Jing explained. “Seagate provided all the storage I needed.”

Lu Jing added that because of his frequent travel schedule, meeting with colleagues at the magazine is difficult. But with the FreeAgent Pro's online storage feature, he could easily share his work, “whenever and wherever” he happened to be. “Tens of thousands of photos were saved for further editing with Seagate's hard drives,” he said. “I found their performance to be truly remarkable and second to none.”

Lu Jing, who led the magazine's photo shoot of the Bird’s Nest, can also apply those words to the stadium's construction workers. “I was inspired by their strength, dedication and determination,” he said. “One goal of our project was to give these builders the respect they richly deserve for their hard work.”

The magazine's photographers also took individual pictures of the workers on site—photos that were used to help connect them with loved ones living far away.

BanSeng Teh, Seagate VP of sales and marketing for Asia-Pacific operations, said the company was honoured to provide support for this tribute “to the thousands of workers providing the backbone of China's Olympic Games.

 “We hope this effort generates excitement around the Beijing National Stadium and helps document the hard work of these unknown and unsung heroes behind this mammoth project,” he said.