| George Herringshaw |
| George Herringshaw has been photographing
sport for nearly forty years and professionally since 1970. His work
has appeared in almost every British daily newspaper (there are over
fifty) and in countless magazines and books. He has travelled
extensively capturing his sporting images, covering all the Olympics
since 1976 and every one of the World Athletics Championships. To
date he has photographed four football World Cup Finals and numerous
European Cup Finals of various kinds. Other sports he has
photographed include Golf, Tennis, Rugby (both codes), Horse Racing
and Cricket. His favourite sport to photograph is athletics, not
entirely surprising as it was the sport he personally most enjoyed -
he was a Leicestershire senior men's 220 yards champion. He formed
the press photo agency “Associated Sports Photography” in the
late 1980s. He is married with three grown up sons. Since 1994, when
he travelled extensively in the USA photographing the Football World
Cup, he has devoted an increasing amount of his time to travel
photography, a web site of which is being developed. For over ten
years he was an officer of the Professional Sports Photographers’
Association and edited their newsletter. The advent of the auto
focus camers systems in the very late 1980s radically altered sports
photography. Skilled follow-focus exponents like George, who
specialized in “stock” photos, became common place (most of the
image on sporting-heroes.net are stock photos) but the
developement enabled him to concentrate more on the compostion of
his pictures. Indeed all photograhers were able to do this and let
their equipment do the mechanical things, like exposure and focus.
The most recent development has been the expansion of professional
digital cameras but thus far George still uses film. The images on sporting-heroes.net
are of course “digital” but are scanned from negative and
transparency originals. |
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| Ed Lacey |
| The photographs of Ed Lacey featured on sporting-heroes.net
cover the period 1950-1976. One of Britain's best known professional
sports photographers of his generation, Ed was killed in a car crash
in October in 1976, a few weeks after returning from photographing
the Montreal Olympic Games. It was the fifth Olympics at which he
had worked. He had been a runner in his youth and was a member of
Belgrave Harriers (London). Athletics was probably the sport his
work was most closely associated with though he also covered Golf
and Tennis during the summer months. Most of the sporting-heroes.net
“photo pages” for the 1960s of Golf and Tennis are the work of
Ed Lacey. During the winter he divided his time between
photographing Cross Country running, Rugby Union and Football . His
photographs were published in all of the English national Newspapers
and they won him many awards. Few books of the period do not include
some of his images. He was then one of a hand- full of sports
photographers shooting colour. However, his most often published
photograph is in black and white, taken at the 1968 Mexico Olympics.
It is a stunning picture of USA long jumper Bob Beamon “in orbit”
shattering the world record by an amazing one foot 9 1/2 inches/55
cm. It won for Ed the international sports picture of the year award
(Beamon’s jump to this day remains the Olympic record). It was Ed’s
photographs in ‘Athletics Weekly’ that caught the eye of the
young George Herringshaw and influenced his approach to sports
photography. They both worked at the Montreal Olympics, Ed’s last
Games and George’s first : it was there that George was able to
see, in close up, how the seasoned professional worked. When out on
location , always pack some food, was just one of the valuable non
photographic lessons he learnt from Ed. |
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| Nigel French |
| Nigel French began his career as a
professional sports photographer in 1989 after studying photography
at Leicester College. Since then he has, every summer, photographed
the Open golf championship and Wimbledon Tennis, along with
countless cricket matches. He has twice visited the West Indies
including the infamous 1998 test at Sabina Park, Jamaica, that
lasted barely two hours. He has covered each of the various British
and European football finals as well as Euro 2000. Other major
events at which he has worked include the European Athletics
Championships, Cricket’s World Cup, The Ryder Cup and Rugby Union’s
World Cup. He has yet to photograph Leicester City F.C. winning the
FA Cup Final at Wembley (or anywhere else). As it happens no one has
ever photographed Leicester City winning the FA cup. His father
first took him to see Leicester City when he was seven and his
affection for the “Foxes” has remained. Needless to say football
is Nigel’s favourite sport and for his 18th birthday he was given
a Leicester City season ticket. That same year he joined Associated
Sports Photography and every Saturday that season he ended up
elsewhere.His younger brother made good use of the season ticket. He
plays golf off a handicap of 10 during what little spare time he
gets. |
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George with cameras and lenses |
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1981 |
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2001 |
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