My Best Shot
August, 2013 World Swimming Championships Nikon D4
Marvel at Bob Martin’s perfectly crisp shot of a synchronised swimmer
If Bob Martin were a sportsman rather than a sports photographer, his face rather than his picture credit would be a regular feature on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Martin is a true legend in his field, the only Sports Illustrated photographer to be based outside of the USA. In 2012, he was the overall photo chief of the London Olympics and is contracted by the All England Club to organise the photography of the Wimbledon tennis championships.
Last August, Martin covered the World Swimming Championships in Barcelona, which included synchronised swimming. His expectations of the sort of photos he’d get weren’t high. As he says, “Synchronised swimming is something I normally try to avoid, if I’m honest. It’s all posing and dancing in the water, so it’s normally something that I don’t like. But on this occasion it produced my favourite picture of the year.”
His photo shows a member of the Russian team spinning in the air during their gold-medal-winning routine. It’s a move that might surprise people unfamiliar with the sport. He says, “In synchronised swimming the throws have started to come in a lot more in recent years, but I was struggling a bit because the lighting and background in Barcelona wasn’t that great. I just found this one little bit of black background, which was basically just crowd.”
The difficult lighting conditions forced Martin to set his Nikon D4 to ISO3200 and his 300mm lens to its maximum f/2.8 aperture in order to get the waterstopping shutter speed of 1/1600 sec. “She was thrown three or four foot above the water and I was lying flat on the pool deck looking up at her, so it has the effect of looking higher.”
The reaction
Although Martin regards this as his best picture of 2013, few people have seen it. “It hasn’t been published very much. It’s been published, to my knowledge, on the Sports Illustrated website as Picture of the Day and also in the new edition of the Nikon lens book The Eyes of Nikon because they wanted the best pictures I had to offer that hadn’t been seen before.” But he thinks it ticks all the boxes for a great action picture: “While it’s a frozen action picture, it hasn’t taken away the movement of the moment,” he says. “What I like is that you see something in the still that you wouldn’t see watching on TV, or in the stadium watching it.”
So will he be entering it for any awards? “I don’t seem to be entering so many awards these days, I seem to be judging!” he laughs. “I think if I end up entering, that will definitely be one I enter for Sports Picture of the Year.”