Featured Sports Photographer – Gerry Cranham

British photographer Gerry Cranham is best known for his horse racing images. But his career in photography has covered a remarkable variety of subjects. He does a search for Cranham’s name, include Winston Churchill as well, and he’ll soon discover an extraordinary image that Cranham captured from the Whispering Gallery at St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1965, the year of Churchill’s death.

Based on his reputation for innovative coverage of sporting events with fisheye lenses in the five years before Churchill’s death, Cranham was commissioned to photograph the interior of St. Paul from above, while the three thousand funeral attendees of Winston Churchill gathered below. The resulting image, taken with an 8mm Fisheye Nikkor to produce an eerie blue panorama of the spectacle below, captures the full majesty of the event.

Cranham went out of his usual routine that cold morning and strapped down his cameras to ensure the safety of mourners below him. Normally, to photograph an event back then, he would take with him four Nikon F cameras, each equipped with a different lens. For horse racing these can be 24mm, 50mm, 85mm and 180mm lenses. His film of choice was Kodachrome 64 and later Kodachrome 25 (now discontinued).

Interestingly, Cranham was a torchbearer for the 1948 Olympics. Before photography caught up with him and consumed his life, he ran middle-distance events and even secured a pair of half-mile championships before a leg injury foot put him out of competitive racing in 1953. After he started training, he picked up his first camera to show his runners where they lacked technique. In two years, photography had taken over his life and there was no going back.

But it was not until 1960 that he had his first big break with the publication of one of his photos in the Observer newspaper. As he gained experience, he came to appreciate that selective focus in sports photography frees the subject from its background and brings the action into the plane of focus to produce compelling images. These images captured with high power telephoto lenses are common today.

But Cranham’s techniques for capturing sports images were groundbreaking in the 1960s. He was the first photographer to zoom his lens *during* slow shutter speed shots to produce images that seemed to burst the action out at the viewer. This effect worked especially well on his frontal shots of horses running straight at the camera. As the eye moves away from the center of the image, the horses and riders appear to jump out of the photo itself.

By panning with the action passing sideways toward him and using slow shutter speeds, Cranham created impressionistic images that conveyed movement much more effectively than the still-moment images of high-shutter photography. He was also the first British photographer to make effective use of remote shooting at horse jumping events, burying his fisheye lens cameras just below the jumps and using long cables to record images that could not be captured otherwise. .

Cranham said he saw amazing things possible with sports photography, but he never forgot the human element as he pursued perfection in his photographs. He was always on the lookout for the defining moment in the sporting event, whether it was the split second of suspension as a high jumper reached the pinnacle of his arc, hanging over the bar before crashing into the padding below, or the moment of impact when a long jumper crashed into the sand pit. Capturing the athlete’s facial expression in those defining moments is one of the surest ways to get his work published, and Cranham has done it time and time again.

But none of that is easy. Like any other professional who earns his way in the world, Cranham put in hours of research before every event and showed up prepared every time. He practiced with his cameras to the point where conscious thought begins to fade and instinct takes over, so that when the time comes to capture the unexpected event, it’s as if the camera itself sensed the fleeting moment and takes over. .

And then the rest becomes photographic history.