DailyExpertNews
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With his last name, you could say that David Cannon was destined for a career behind the lens.
After receiving the PGA of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Photojournalism in May, the 67-year-old was praised for his “technical mastery and artistic skill.”
But while his first professional camera was a Canon, the Englishman’s journey to become one of the world’s leading sports photographers was anything but predestined: he had never even had a formal education.
Born in Sussex, Cannon was a talented golfer in his youth, with a handicap of one. He took part in many amateur tournaments, finishing eighth at the British Youths Golf Championship in 1974 and playing with a young Nick Faldo at the following year’s tournament.
But sharing the fairways with the future six-time major winner wiped out any hopes Cannon had for a professional playing career.
“When I Played With Him” [Faldo]it was like, ‘Oh sh*t, I’m not even in the same league,'” he told DailyExpertNews Sport. “He was just something different.”
Needing a job to cover the lack of financial rewards in amateur golf, Cannon worked at a nylon record company, but after four years, he longed for a change of pace. When an impromptu conversation with family friend Neville Chadwick, a photographer with the Leicester News Service, offered the chance to capture some local sporting events, Cannon was right on target.
He sold his car to finance a small telephoto lens and camera – a Canon AE-1, of course – shortly after sitting in a rugby stadium for a New Zealand Tour match in November 1979.
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The 24-year-old was armed with just two tips that have served as the foundation of his craft ever since: “Focus on the eyes and fill the frame.”
“I was gone, that was it. The light bulb came on,” Cannon said. “Playing golf suddenly took a huge backseat and every free minute I had was buying cameras with extra money, taking pictures, going to games.”
In 1983, after covering everything from the Commonwealth Games in Australia to FIFA World Cup qualifiers in Honduras, he joined the esteemed AllSport photography agency. Although Cannon was acquired by Getty Images in 1998, Cannon has worked there effectively ever since, specializing in golf to quickly become one of the most recognizable names in the field.
“I have loved every minute of it,” he said, and there have certainly been many minutes to love.
Cannon has covered more than 700 events and nearly 200 men’s and women’s majors, according to an interview with the Ryder Cup, the biannual event in which he has competed 17 times.
Cannon’s dazzling estimates of his career statistics: shot 3.4 million frames, flown 2.6 million miles, visited 115 countries, slept 5,000 nights in hotels, and walked 13,000 miles on golf courses.
Still, Cannon insists it’s a necessary commitment. While sports like soccer offer photographers — at the very least — the opportunity to celebrate almost any game, golf’s less dynamic nature can make for slim choices.
“You can go at least six months — probably two years — without getting a fantastic final still image,” he explained.
“Golf is very slow. People don’t realize how physical it is to photograph golf. You can walk 25,000 steps a day, and all you get are individual shots of golfers hitting the ball and nothing interesting if they’re on fairways all the time.”
Fortunately for Cannon, his career has coincided with some of the most iconic golfers, many of whom he has personally come to know.
Keeping in touch with Faldo, he became close friends with Ernie Els and got to know Greg Norman – a trio with 12 major wins in between – and sat front row at the height of the Tiger Woods era at the turn of the century.
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Photographing Rory McIlroy and newly crowned US Open champion Matt Fitzpatrick since they were amateurs, he has had the pleasure of following their journeys from the grassroots to earning some of the biggest golf titles.
Yet one name stands out above all others: Seve Ballesteros. “Never meet your heroes,” the adage goes, but Cannon not only had the joy of breaking his all-time sports idol, he became a close friend.
A portrait of the legendary Spaniard captured near his home in Pedreña in 1996 remains one of Cannon’s best-loved photographs. And his photos of the five-time major champion’s iconic fist-pump celebration in St Andrews en route to an Open victory in 1984 are some of the most enduring images of Ballesteros, who died of brain cancer in 2011.
“It’s probably the most defining photo of my career,” Cannon said. “Of a moment, that’s my favorite.”
When Cannon took that photo, with his 36-shot camera, he only had 25 shots to choose from from the entire sequence. Today he could choose five more photos in one second. But while technology has changed dramatically, the principles of sports photography have not.
Cannon was reminded of one of these guiding rules when – as a caddy for his professional golfer son Chris – he overanalyzed a three-hole swing earlier.
“Dad, that’s one thing you have to learn, there’s a 10-second rule in golf,” Cannon recalls his son saying. “‘Ten seconds after you hit the shot, you can’t get it back, you can’t help it, you have to get it out of your mind.”
“That rule works exactly the same in photography. If you miss it, you can’t go back to get it. If you are at a sporting event, it will never happen again. I think that’s a pretty handy rule.”
One of the craft’s key skills is to preemptively sense and move a story or moment to prepare accordingly. It’s easier said than done on courses that span miles of fairway, where multiple games take place at once, but the advice can pay off big.
These were harvested in abundance by Cannon during the Alfred Dunhill Cup in 1999 through his shot of basketball icon Michael Jordan and Spanish golfer Sergio Garcia involved in a run across the fairways of St Andrews, once described as “the greatest golf photo of all time.” in Golf Digest.
Hearing Jordan and Garcia rush each other on the first tee, Cannon decided to stay out and follow the duo down the third hole, the point where the newspaper photographers—reluctant to venture further from the clubhouse—decided to head back inside.
“I heard Jordan say to Garcia, ‘You want a running race, kid?’” Cannon recalled.
“It was a lot of fun following them that day, and from then on I was a few hundred meters ahead the whole time.”
It’s the kind of know-how that has kept Cannon at the top of its field for more than four decades. Not bad for someone with no formal training.
