Canon Ambassador Andrei Golovanov, who works in partnership with fellow Russian photographer Sergei Kivrin, captured this atmospheric black and white image of a competitor riding a flyboard during a motorboat championship on the Pirogov Reservoir in Russia. Taken on a Canon EOS-1D X Mark II (now succeeded by the Canon EOS-1D X Mark III) with a Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS III USM lens at 70mm, 1/2500 sec, f/5.6 and ISO200. © Andrei Golovanov
Canon Ambassadors and Russian sports photographers Andrei Golovanov and Sergei Kivrin are a great example of why two heads are better than one.
Their collaborative imagery has adorned the pages of almost all of Russia's daily newspapers and sports magazines, plus international titles such as Newsweek, Cosmopolitan, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times for more than 30 years.
However, it wasn't sports photography that first piqued Sergei's interest; the son of the famous Soviet photographer Vladislav Kivrin wanted to be a photojournalist. "At the end of the eighties dramatic events took place in our country, and genres such as sport were not interesting against that backdrop. People fought for their lives, not for gold medals," Sergei explains. His eventual frustration with the authorities led him to try a new genre. "I began to shoot sports, because during those Soviet times it was the only area where you could show the truth. Other types of photography were basically just propaganda."