Sporting photographer Jim Meads achieved a personal milestone and undoubtedly established a world record on December 5, 2010 when he photographed the Loudoun West Hunt near Leesburg, Virginia. This was the five hundredth unique hunt that Meads has photographed over the course of a career spanning sixty years.
Meads, who lives in Wales, follows hunts on foot and in vehicles and always seems to appear where the action is, even before the mounted followers arrive. His long legs and astounding endurance has allowed him to capture many of the greatest action shots of foxhunting ever recorded on film. He has photographed hunts in England, Ireland, Canada, and the U.S.
Meads has worked for The Field, Shooting Times, and Horse and Hound magazines in the U.K., and has been a regular contributor to In & Around Horse Country here in the U.S. He has published five books of his photographs, starting with Full Cry, My Hunting World, They Will Always Meet at Eleven, They Still Meet at Eleven, and Going Home, his last book, published in 2008 by the Quiller Press, UK.
One day in 1962, Meads took his young sons to watch the airplanes at the De Havilland Aircraft Company airfield, where he had worked just after WWII.
“For some unexplainable reason, I took a camera with me, which I never do unless I am working,” writes Meads. “Suddenly a jet fighter coming in to land had a hydraulic malfunction and decided to crash less than one hundred yards from where we were standing. In an instant I had the camera up to my eye and pressed the trigger as the pilot left his plane by the ejector seat. Result: Picture of the Year Worldwide for 1962.”
Jim Meads set the goal of five hundred hunts for himself some years ago, and achieved it at the age of eighty. Those who know him well are waiting to hear what he is planning next!
A slide show of Meads’s Loudoun West Hunt milestone, photographed by our own Douglas Lees, is posted in Gallery.
December 7. 2010
