Sports Photography Quotes

As a professional climber and photographer, I am asked to shoot in a lot of situations with a lot of different people. Sometimes I'm with the hardest, most seasoned alpinists in the world. Sometimes I'm hanging out with celebrities doing a benefit climb.

But sports photography isn't something you just pick up overnight. You can't do it once a year for fun and expect to do a good job. And I take pride in what I do.

After his hockey days, my dad became a photographer, and a really good one, at that. He used to shoot the Expos and Canadiens, and he'd give me five bucks to haul around his equipment during games. He never had to ask me twice to do it.

The newspapers loved pinup pictures of pretty young swimmers, and as a national champion, I got more than my share of space in the sports pages.

When I'm at the game, I try to put the fans into my shoes. I'm snapping pictures right and left.

One of the walls of my bedroom was a collage of about 15 years of baseball photos. I would cut out the baseball pictures from every issue and I had this huge montage of thousands of pictures.

Being a celebrity you always get really good seats to sporting events but you never get as good seats as the photographers get. And I really love sports. So one of the scams I have going now is I want to learn sports photography so I can get better seats at a sporting event.

I think the first photograph I did was a ballplayer. It was a way of showing action or something.

I don't want to sound too critical, but a lot of fans at some grounds I go to have got cameras in their hands, taking pictures of anything rather than generating any atmosphere during the game.

My dad was always taking photos of us at home, and even on set - he'd bring us along and stick us in the photos in the background. It was almost the beginning of acting for me, like, 'Hey, you go over there and play basketball in the background, and don't even think about the camera.'

My claim to fame has always been that iconic picture that ended up in 'The San Francisco Chronicle' of Bill Russell jumping over my head.

The most important thing you learn as a sports photographer is anticipation - not where the action is taking place, but where it's going to take place. Not where the subject is now, but where they're going to be.

I'm an unabashed sports photo fanboy, the kind of weirdo who seeks out the infinitesimal picture credits.

And I love shooting football.

In fact, my entire childhood consisted of looking at photographs in which the viewer sees the ball behind the line, looking through the goal net, and the poor goalkeeper in front of the net.

I'm on the cover of the lingerie football swimsuit calendar this year.

I remember going to The Open in 1998 aged seven and snatching a picture of Tiger walking past.

We have four million pictures of sports events and add 5,000 a week. If I was 14, I'd have them all over my walls.

I photographed all kinds of sports - Formula 1, Formula Atlantic. And anybody who knows me knows that, from the day they invented video cameras, I used to lug them around when you had to carry the pack here and the big camera here, plus the diaper bag and a baby and the purse or whatever.