Plunge

General News, second prize singles

1971

A British 10-man parachute team practices.

Photographer David Waterman made the picture while he accompanied the parachutists as they plunged towards earth at 120 miles per hour. He used a Canon F-1 camera with a 17mm lens and a motor drive, which he had attached to his crash helmet.

Photo Credit: David Waterman

David was born in the East of London in 1937. The East End having always been (and still is) the mixing bowl of London.

With his siblings he was evacuated during the second world war to a small Devon village, Kingskerswell, where he enjoyed a country upbringing, winning a scholarship to Newton Abbot Grammar School.

In 1964, David took up skydiving with a relish and was soon taking his helmet mounted camera into the action.

By the time he had packed his parachute for the last time (in the mid eighties) he had made over 2500 skydives, and represented Great Britain four times in World Championships. Twice as team leader.

By the early sixties he was working as a freelance almost exclusively for The Daily Sketch during the week and The Sunday Mirror on a Saturday.

By the mid sixties David was being published in most of the Nationals and then embryonic colour supplements published by the Telegraph and the Sunday Times as well as the Illustrated London News and other magazines. His work was syndicated world wide by Camera Press. In the late sixties he spent six months in Israel on a retainer for the Observer covering the war of attrition.

The eighties saw a change of direction. David ran a corporate video production company, Images Sight and Sound, based in Cheltenham selling it in 1992 and moving to Spain.

David is now based in the Sierra de Alhama, in Malaga Province, Andalusia having rebuilt a 100 year old mill and is currently working on a retrospective work book and People/Landscape book on Morocco. Having gone completely digital (Nikon D2xs) he now also has a Herculean task of digitizing 45 years of film onto a data base.