Picture this

Ireland's photographer of the year once surprised his career guidance teacher by suggesting he wanted to take pictures for a living.

He’s in Egypt at the moment, he’s a geophysicist, he’s always in demand. 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. They congregate from around November to March, they form these shapes and sleep in the reeds. “In GAA terms, the best corner to shoot from is right there towards the Hogan and Davin Stands. The Hill itself is not the most attractive to shoot back into. I try to bring the kids to school two or three days a week and to collect them in the evenings. Sport was dead so we spent a lot of time looking back and scanning old pictures of Italia 90 and the like. There is a good reason many top snappers gather at the Hill 16 corner of Croke Park every summer and it isn’t all about the back and forth with the denizens of the Hill. “I love being able to spot the story in the game. I keep thinking I will go to a game and end up with the perfect picture. 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. In the media newsroom at the University of Limerick, he offers a taste of the insane schedules to bemused students: “I left the house Friday morning at 2 am to head for Dublin airport, flew to London with Billy (Stickland), then drove to Doncaster, ate some terrible food, and did the England v Wales Under 20 Six Nations game. 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.