Dauget 5

Rolex Middle Sea Race 2025

South Comino Channel, Malta

This photograph is special to me for reasons that go far beyond the split-second moment it captures. Taken during the finish of the 2025 Rolex Middle Sea Race, it shows Daguet 5 at the precise moment her spinnaker is being retrieved, the sail suspended in the air for a fraction of a second. It’s one of those moments in yacht racing photography where timing is everything. But what makes this image particularly meaningful to me is the story behind the camera. Fifteen minutes earlier, while photographing the yacht ahead of it, the shutter on my main camera suddenly failed. With some incredible light and several yachts still to finish, I was left with just my backup: a Canon EOS 1200D, the very first camera I ever owned. I took the 70–200mm lens off my broken camera, fitted it to the old DSLR, and carried on. I’d gone from a modern mirrorless camera capable of capturing dozens of frames per second to an entry-level camera managing just three per second. I’ll admit, I was frustrated. But I wasn’t going to let that stop me. And somehow, with just those three frames per second, I managed to capture this exact moment. To anyone else, it might simply be a photograph of a beautiful racing yacht. To me, it’s a reminder of why I fell in love with photography in the first place. The equipment can help you capture a moment, but it’s the photographer who has to see it coming. Sometimes the photographs that mean the most are the ones you almost never took.

Canon EOS 1200D, 70mm, 400, 5.6 , 1/1600