The Glamourous Life Of An International Sports’ Photographer

At State of Origin time, I’m oft reminded of Jason’s illustrious, but brief, career as a sports’ photographer. He worked for Getty Images, no less, and covered a range of sports, from tennis, to motorsports, to golf and NRL. Now, NRL has never been a favourite sport of ours. We love State of Origin because it’s nice and quiet at the movies. So, when Jason covered NRL games, his approach was to shoot whomever had the ball and then, at half time, he would madly file the images and send them back to the UK for immediate distribution. The only trick was, he had to caption each image with the name of the player/s before he sent it. Mmmm. Not so easy, but Jason deftly used his strong relationships with the other journos and photographers, who were happy to help their hapless mate. One day, in the midst of a frantic half time in which all the media outlets were hustling to get their communications filed, Jason turned his laptop to his colleagues for help in identifying the pictured player. The room let out a resounding groan as they answered in unison: "Joey Johns of course". This was followed by (well deserved) muttering about the moron from Getty, but Jason ignored that as he raced to file the image. He typed the name, Georgie Jones, and hit send. He could breathe. Another job well done. How does this story end? Well, let’s just say he’s not a sports' photographer anymore.