Racing photographer

Edward Whitaker on Princess Anne's fall launching his career, super blue blood moons and getting the perfect shot from 100ft high

- Madeleine Silver

My earliest taste of photography came at Badminton in 1982, when I was 16. I was accompanying my father James Whitaker, who was a journalist in Fleet Street and the royal correspondent on various newspapers [most notably The Daily Mirror], and the royal photographer Tim Graham.

Tim gave me a camera with a black-and-white film and sitting next to him at the water jump, I managed to get a sequence of Princess Anne falling with Stevie B. I was paid £50 and thought, “This is the career I want to do.”

When I was a teenager, one of my father’s jobs was to report on Prince Charles, who was the most eligible bachelor in the world. Dad would take me along to polo matches, point-to-points and horse racing. His life reporting on the royals and travelling around the world was all very exciting.

When I was on the newspaper industry’s photojournalism course in Sheffield, I freelanced for the Racing Post’s dummy editions before they first published in 1986. Afterwards, when I was on a gap year travelling, I received a call asking if I’d like to be their junior staff photographer.