Pro Talk: David Davies – Press Association
“You’re also always looking for different vantage points, and at the recent Cheltenham Festival I clamped my camera to a TV cherry picker just to get a higher view and an angle that looked out over the whole race course. And then, of course, the sun went in at the vital moment, and all those long shadows I’d envisaged were sadly gone. You have to look at what you get with a remote as a bonus picture, and they give you the chance to build the overall coverage a little more.”
Positioning of the camera and the lens used are also both crucial considerations. A camera positioned just behind a goal with an ultra-wide lens fitted, for example, will result in a huge goalkeeper, a football the size of a beach ball and an attacking player who looks tiny by comparison. “Everything will be out of perspective, and it just doesn’t work,” says David. “You have to be disciplined in terms of how you work with remotes, and people are getting better with them all the time.”
The other problem with remote cameras is that, once positioned, there’s no returning to them, and there’s always the danger that the skies will suddenly open and kit will get a drenching. “One of my OCDs is getting my cameras wet,” confesses David. “Football is probably the worst, since you’ll set your cameras out at five to three and then there will be a downpour and there’s nothing you can do about it until half time: you just have to sit there and take it on the chin. If you know it’s going to rain you can fit a rain cover, but still the front element will get wet and that can ruin your shot.
“It can work in your favour, however. I shot a picture of Lewis Hamilton when he won a GP in Monaco, and he unloaded a bottle of champagne all over the front of the lens. And I had a picture that was all distorted thanks to the liquid, but his face remained sharp, and it ended up being a great shot. And the Sony cameras these days can take a bit of rain and they seem to be really robust, so getting wet isn’t the kiss of death for cameras that it used to be.”
All these years on David is clearly still just as motivated and in love with his sport as he ever was, and the fact that he’s honed his craft against a background of evolving camera technology somehow makes the satisfaction of achieving such a consistently strong portfolio of work so much greater. With a determination to utilise everything that today’s sophisticated kit has to offer in his search for still more cutting-edge imagery David is an example to all those looking to break into the genre of sports photography that there is never a point in a career where you should allow yourself to stand still.
