Photographers Blog

It certainly is the best seat in the house, but sitting close to the boundary of a cricket field does not necessarily ensure you would have a good time watching the match. Cricket is like a religion in India. An unusual game, that goes on all day even through lunch and tea. Naturally then, covering this game in India is like covering it nowhere else in the world.

At least four hours before a match, photographers start out for the stadium, winding through noisy, mile-long lines. The lines of spectators are so long that one wonders if the last man actually gets to see the full match.

Security is often difficult. Parking passes are virtually impossible to get. So there’s little else a photographer can do, but walk along crowded dusty paths carrying heavy equipment. Certainly not a good thing for the faint-hearted!

It was no different at the India-Australia one-day match in Vadodara. The intense bag-checking by the police at several places made getting into the stadium an adventure sport by itself. Undeterred, spectators thronged the stadium well before the game. A glimpse of the players during pre-match practice was all it took to drive them into a tizzy. The cheering in the stadium is so loud that all laws on noise levels seem to be breached. Only the law of the willow prevails.

Photographers too go into a tizz when players appear, albeit for a different reason. When players practice in front of photographers, a straight or cover drive or a throw from a fielder sends us scurrying for cover too. Lenses get hit, laptops take a rap. Recently a photographer got hit on his head by a jet-paced-ball from an Australian cricketer. He  was lucky to come away with only minor injuries.

My nickname among the Reuters photographers in Tokyo is "Crasher".

They call me that because I always seem to get pictures right at the moment of a crash whenever I cover motorsports.

One colleague sometimes teases me saying "You’ve got to stop pouring oil on the track," and I answer: "I would never use oil -- I only use banana skins!"

In motorsports the most exciting moment you can capture in a picture is a crash.

Bob Radocy of TRS Inc. lost his his left hand when he fell asleep at the wheel and side swiped a semi-trailer truck. He now designs and builds prosthetic attachments that allow amputee athletes to participate in multiple sports. Bob tells photographer Rick Wilking about his motivations in this multimedia piece.

I came to New York in 1971 to work for the Associated Press and I covered the weekend shift at both Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium, where the Mets played. I’ve spent a good part of my life covering baseball in New York, the last 21 years for Reuters.

The Yankees ballpark had the air of a grand old lady, slightly down on her luck. At first sight it was an impressive structure with the historic field and that magnificent original copper frieze that lined the stadium’s roof above the upper deck. But a close look revealed a stadium deteriorating almost everywhere.

For a working photographer it was no fun, one had to kneel in an aisle to shoot pictures or work in a “crows nest” box hung over the upper deck wall behind the Yankees dugout. But there was a palatable sense of history present, for me, every day I worked there.

People often ask “what is the hardest sport to shoot?”. I always say “downhill skiing”. Sure there are 5 hour long baseball games and 5 day cricket matches, football games in the rain, sleet and snow. Heck just making it through an Olympic games is a bit like boot camp. But when you add up all the work and skill that goes into making a good downhill skiing picture, for me, it’s the most difficult sport to shoot.

Lake Louise hosts “Winterstart” each year. The season’s first World Cup alpine downhill skiing races is held at what has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth. They come because Lake Louise is cold.

It’s beautiful, but it’s cold. If it’s -20c when you head up the hill in the morning with 50 lbs of cameras on your back it’s an average day. The cold means snow making , and they always have enough snow here early in the season to hold the races; take that global warming!