It's been my pleasure to produce this book with Egoth Publishing in Vienna, Austria (
www.egoth.at). I met Egon Theiner, the publisher, while in Sicily at the World Junior/Cadets this year, and he proposed a great plan for the book. We finalized details in Beijing at the Olympic Games.
We've worked hard to select images - not an easy task, given that we had at least 750 to 1000 candidate images from the last five years (from a total of more than one million original shots) at several dozen world events. There were lots of discussions as to which images should be in the book, or not, to best represent the sport and this Olympic quadrennial. Craig Harkins was also instrumental in helping us with writing captions and helping us with selections.
There were
so many images I would have liked to include, but for one reason or another we could not!
One image in the book I'd especially like to point out is actually a series of four images - it's the lead-up and follow-up of the "Jumping Jonathan" image from Athens. This is an image that some people have even questioned if it really happened, and these images (which I've never published anywhere) show the sequence.
My vision was to have something that could be in people's homes or fencing clubs that would last longer than a magazine, and that could especially be enjoyed for years and shared with the coaches, fencers, parents, and supporters of fencing so that they could see the passion, excitement, and athleticism of world-class fencing more closely and in a very accessible way.
This is my third book this year, including one on EOS Canon SLR cameras as well as the sixth edition of
Digital Photography for Dummies, but for many reasons
The Image of Fencing is my favorite work ever. I hope you all enjoy it!