In this competitive business if we can’t do ’exclusive’ or ‘definitive’, we go for ’better’ and/or ‘faster’ than anyone else’s.

Joshua Roberts

An incidental by-product of this is an unvoiced convention that where possible competing colleagues exclude one another from their pictures in part to keep images as ‘clean’ as possible but also in order to convey an impression of unrivalled or exclusive access to the event in question. It is largely unwitting and more presentational than an attempt to mislead or misrepresent and when one considers that most days there will be around 40 photographers on the touchline at a Chelsea soccer match and very many more at big set piece events on the White House lawn, it is usually something of a forlorn hope.

Yves Herman

In spite of this, most of us have at some stage ended-up in the backround of a competitor’s front page picture. If we are lucky we appear to be the model of professionalism, working with camera raised, but many a hapless individual has been caught, camera down staring into space. These are the pictures that pinned to the office notice board, we unwittingly walk past for days on end to the delight of our workmates, until the penny finally drops.