About hockeyshooter / Chris Valentine  

Note to Yahoo: I do not give permission to Yahoo to give the rights of my photos to Microsoft should Yahoo be sold to them.

Note about image downloads: I recently changed the setting that allows the download of my images. This was because I don't like the idea of tools like Flump and the way they break all links between images and accreditation. All my photos are copyright - I do not intend making it any easier for people to copy them and reuse them without my permission or without due credit. If you want to use any of my images, get in contact.

I have been taking photos since the age of 14, but since 1998 have been working as a freelance photographer shooting mostly sports, landscape and travel. For a couple of seasons from January 2006, I covered Premiership, Championship, League and FA Cup soccer for a sports picture agency. You won't see any of these photos here, though, due to the strict rules placed on their use.

My day job is as a web designer and server-side scripter for a well-known distance-teaching institution in the UK, which also involves some photography. Plus I am chairman of the staff camera club.

Almost as soon as Canon's D30 was launched, I switched entirely to digital photography and haven't looked back. I now use a 1D which is an excellent bit of kit for sports and news coverage. I use Canon L-series lenses due to their very high build quality. My latest purchase is a 1D Mk.IIn body which will save me having to swap a body between lenses when covering soccer. For sending images to the media from the field, I use an HP nx6110 laptop with BreezeBrowser, Photoshop and a Vodafone 3G modem.

The shots you'll see on my Flickr account are a mixture of stuff from both my Canon gear and, at the other end of the optical scale, from a Nokia 6230 camera/phone, often submitted directly from the phone by email. As of December 2006, I have upgraded to a Pro account so I can host more images here. With the UKP/US$ exchange rate so good (for us at least), it seemed like the thing to do.


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If you'd like to get in touch, to order prints or enquire about images for publication, please visit my website and see the Prices, Ordering, Rights and Contact information page.

I have recently added the following paragraph to most of my image captions so that there can be no doubt over their status - it seems that Yahoo have been using some images uploaded to Flickr in advertising without the copyright owners' consent:
This image is copyright © - absolutely no commercial use of any kind is permitted without prior consent.

I have just finished co-moderating the third presentation of the Open University short course T189 Digital Photography: Creating and Sharing Better Images.