Photo agency comes up trumps with ton-up O’Gara montage

OUR Weekend Sport cover to mark Ronan O’Gara’s 100th Heineken Cup appearance today was conceived and designed by the Inpho sports photography.

The agency’s commercial manager Norman McCloskey came to company founder Billy Stickland with the idea to mark the historic achievement. McCloskey said: “I saw one before on Ryan Giggs in The Guardian and had it in the back of my head to likewise for an Irish sportsman. So I went to Billy with the suggestion and it took off. We have something like 2000 images on our site of O’Gara playing for Munster so I went through them all and began to compile a montage.

“To make something like this work we had to use a variety of different images, some with more sky, some with more grass, some close up and so on. Then we fed it all into a computer software programme which put them together. After that we overlaid his face onto it again. It was a bit of work but looking at the finished product on screen it was definitely worth the effort.

Stickland explained why they had gone to such trouble: “I think Ronan is sometimes underestimated. People don’t put him in the same bracket as the likes of Brian O’Driscoll but he is a phenomenal player who has achieved so much with Munster, Ireland and the Lions. This montage is a reflection of what he has done for his province.”