james Crombie, the country’s most feted photographer, is sitting opposite a group of journalism students at the University of Limerick, debating the elusiveness of the perfect picture. He pulls off his baseball cap to elongate the thought process. Does it even exist?

First off, the action has to be of unique quality and there has to be a really clean background – no goalposts or other spoilers. I am always saying ‘try to not have the goal posts in the background of a GAA shot cause it's like a pole coming out of someone’s head’. They're small little things that can destroy a nice picture.” He has an outline of what it looks like in an Irish sporting context. A Gaelic football game, rippling with herculean athleticism, giants leaping the height of tall buildings, or at least their equivalent. It’s in his mind’s eye but once in a while – once every two years, he reckons – he sees it, but it eludes him.

“I was in Castlebar on Monday at a minor game. It came at the end of a busy weekend – Friday in Belfast for rugby, Saturday in Croke Park, Sunday in Semple Stadium for the Munster final, where we got a soaking. You go to Castlebar and know there will be nice pictures, but you think to yourself, this could be the one, the night when something spectacular happens. That ethereal moment of perfection that is so hard to get. If you’ve seen it, you’ve probably missed it. You’re too far away, the moment is the other end of the pitch, or someone will block the shot. I keep thinking I will go to a game and end up with the perfect picture. But it hasn’t happened so far.”

With a pair of PPAI photographer of the year gongs on his mantelpiece at home in Tullamore – though, exclamation point, he’s a Westmeath man - the facility of the perfect picture to elude him demands interrogation. Crombie once went to the same spot around Lough Ennell in the midlands for sixty consecutive nights to shoot starlings in sync and employed the mathematical skills of a geophysicist to calculate distance and angle from the full moon for a hurling silhouette. Like most patient men who wait in the long grass, he invariably gets the money shot.

But perfection? Even at a click away, unattainable.

“There have been some lovely GAA pictures that had most though not all the component parts of the perfect picture. There was that sweet shot of the hurley bending, though it wasn’t a perfect background or composition even if the moment was perfect. Probably the most memorable one was Nicky English with the Cork hurley (of Denis Walsh) under his nose back in 1990 (taken by James Meehan).

“Everyone says hurling, hurling, hurling but I love Gaelic football. You get great football pictures from the waist up and that makes it more accessible. I also think hurling has lost some of its personality since helmets became mandatory. When Waterford had the likes of Dan Shanahan, John Mullane, Eoin Kelly, Ken McGrath, Tony Browne, they were icons. If Seamus Callanan walked down the street now, I’m not sure I would know him, though I accept it’s about safety and player welfare.

“Soccer is more difficult. You need full-length head to toe, and you need the key moment, which is the goal. So, if Troy Parrott is scoring for Ireland today, you get two frames – one with his leg cocked, and two kicking the ball. In rugby, when someone is scoring a try, you can get 25-30 frames. Getting the perfect soccer shot is tough. There was a marvellous exception with that picture from Eoin Noonan and Dan Sheridan of Cristiano Ronaldo and Shane Duff at the Aviva, the perfect box ticker of the superstar and the Irish player. But if it wasn’t Ronaldo in the shot, would that have been as memorable? We need the David Cliffords, we need the Cody and Shefflin handshake thing. That is the drama we need in sport. I was beside Cody for about a minute of that and I know what he said. It’s great to be in the middle of that drama.” 

“Doing Ireland v Ukraine on Wednesday, a PR job Thursday, I have a friends’ wedding on Friday, back to the Aviva for Ireland v Scotland on Saturday and then to Clones on Sunday for Armagh-Donegal in the Football Championship. Billy is still doing it at sixty-odd so I’ve no excuse (Crombie is 40). It’s a tough, unhealthy existence. I try to bring the kids to school two or three days a week and to collect them in the evenings. Ann is far more intelligent than I, she has her degrees, but she has made massive sacrifices for me to do this. We have four kids from eleven to five, one of which is Down’s Syndrome. Anyone else would have left me at this stage.” 

The Irish media punches many miles above its station in terms of high-end sports photography. Stickland’s Inpho and Sportsfile, still run by Ray McManus, provide an absurdly good service across the sporting spectrum, at home and afar. There are no equals across Europe and nobody travels as much around Europe as the agencies – though that never guarantees some sports desk won’t be moaning that the cover shot is the wrong dimension.

“You learn that it can’t always be in your corner. If I think I’ve done a shit job, of course I am annoyed but if I’ve done everything I could and the pictures didn’t fall, then that’s ok,” says Crombie.

“I love being able to spot the story in the game. I remember the time Lar Corbett marked Kilkenny’s Tommy Walsh in 2012, I remember spotting that after three or four minutes. Or when Kieran Donaghy punched Aidan O’Shea in the 2017 All-Ireland semi-final (picture above), it’s nice when you see something about to happen and you are on the ball to get it. Sometimes you just know. You see Michael Lowry running in for the try (for Ireland against Italy) and Ringrose is celebrating in the frame, and I knew that was the shot.” 

He liked Colin Hogg in school but like anything, they grew up in sixth year and grew apart after. Hogg went off to do clever things in college, Crombie messed around in Carlow, tinkering with his own focus. Photography straightened his life out and twelve years later, Hogg called.

“He was getting married, he had been following my career and wanted me to do their ceremony. That’s how we got back in touch. He’s in Egypt at the moment, he’s a geophysicist, he’s always in demand. He helped me with the murmuration picture and with the hurler in the moon.

“We spent sixty nights – sixty! - around Lough Ennell, clearing drains, cutting barbed wire, finding the right spot. They move around, those starlings, in a five or six kilometre radius, but we studied and analysed and got to know their routes. I live about 25kms away, but I see them gathering in the evenings. They come from around a 30km radius to one spot and form these magnificent shapes to scare off birds of prey, be it a hawk or a buzzard. They can get quite tetchy. They congregate from around November to March, they form these shapes and sleep in the reeds. Then you won’t see them til the winter again.

“Colin and his wife had just lost their baby boy, Daniel, after he was born. And these stakeouts around Lough Ennell were therapeutic to an extent, to help him deal with the bereavement and also to just get through a difficult time. It was quite emotional. We felt, if we got nothing out of it, it was great for that reason. They’ve had a lovely daughter since. I had got the picture of the starlings around the dead tree which was nice and my wife, my mother, my father were saying, ‘you got the shot you were after with the murmuration around the dead tree’, but I kept thinking there’s another shot here. I can’t explain why I kept going back.”

The hurler in the moon idea had been in Crombie’s mind’s eye for years upon years. He took care of the lens but knew that Hogg’s protractor would be required for the maths of the shot.

“Doing that picture, I was thinking what part of a moon cycle would we have to get? Cloghan Hill between Tyrrellspass and Rhode is close to us, with no trees around. Colin reckoned it was junior cert maths, but it certainly was more complex than that with the longitude and latitudes. We need to be 1.1km away, if we put the person there 47 minutes after the moon crests on the horizon, would that work? We got the picture I envisaged.” Does the country’s top photographer for the last two years prefer the art or the emotion of the image? Does he need the shot to be clean or chaotic? As someone who admits he loses focus when the game is sterile, does he want to be invested in the moment or coolly detached?