Steve Powell

Phil Osgood has it all. The wonderful wife, the fabulous kids, the lucrative career. He really only has one problem. He’s bored. Quietly, Phil steps out of his lane and moonlights with a local detective. It’s a good compromise. What starts as a diversion turns into a hunt for missing friends. When the hunt leads to bodies and Phil is implicated, the diversion gets personal – and deadly. For the first time, Phil isn’t sure he’s going to win. And if he loses, he loses everything.

In The Image Business, Steve Powell's autobiography lifts the lid on the development of sports photography and photojournalism. With a no holds barred account of his life as a working photographer and business innovator, he tells of covering world-beating sporting successes and occasional failures, and of how he built the Allsport photographic agency into an industry leader that made him a millionaire. He has worked with everyone from world beating powerboat racers to Olympic greats such as Seb Coe and Daley Thompson. Muhammad Ali, Bjorn Borg, Seve Ballesteros and Diego Maradona have all been his subjects during a lifetime of capturing iconic images. Unique insights into the athletes and administrators who shaped sport over thirty years could only come from a true insider. He gives a fascinating and fast paced narrative of a career that began on the gritty streets of London and took him to every global arena where sport is played, working with every major publication and sponsor as he developed ways to help them deliver their messages. Powell reveals the struggles of an emerging independent agency as it fought to gain recognition, how it helped break the union stranglehold on Fleet Street and established Allsport and its photographers as the go-to source for all that was best in the emerging sports photography industry. Follow his riveting personal narrative as he describes how he overcame personality clashes that almost brought the agency to its knees and how riding the tide of advancing technologies helped create a unique business model. Always just one step ahead of the opposition, his career mirrors how he harnessed fast moving changes in the industry to create his own unique place in sports media history. This is the story of the man who built the world's biggest and most famous sports photography business and under whose guidance, became the first official photographer to the International Olympic Committee and worked with every major sporting organisation, governing body and athlete in Europe, and North America. Finally, the book traces with engaging candour his learning curve in preparing the company for sale, turning the business of capturing images into capitalising images as a business. The buyer was Mark Getty and guided by Powell, Allsport became a bedrock in the rapidly emerging Getty Images and made Powell more successful than he could have imagined.

Alan Steele Nicholson, Former Press Officer - US Senator Jacob Javitz, New York"Brilliant and timely political who-done-it. Having been a press officer for a US Senator for a number of years, I've had a front row seat to the inter workings of Capital Hill. To my mind, Powell has masterfully combined the timeliness of today's political intrigue with a gripping detective story/who-done-it. By bringing the mind-boggling swirling mess that is Washington politics down to the level of one family's pain he held me glued to the page."What I found particularly remarkable was how easily I found myself sympathizing with the 'villain', and how well-crafted and human was Powell's plea that we need to finally bring common sense back to our government and its approaches to critical problems facing the country and the world."A deceptively easy read -- given its thunderous message. Term Limits should be require reading for every new politician heading to Washington." Murder - week after week, month after month, across the country. Pushed beyond his limits, one man takes on the establishment, the gun lobby, and corruption at the highest levels. To break the power of entrenched elites, he leads the nation on a grisly hunt. He's hunting them. And they're hunting him. One side will have to blink. In the meantime, people are dying. Term Limits is a thriller from the front pages of our newspapers. It couldn't be more topical.

Shropshire is not a place usually associated with natural caves, due to its irregular geological positioning. Nevertheless, unknown to many, there are small numbers of explorable cave passages and underground features to be found. Nearly a decade ago, Steve Powell noticed how quickly Shropshire's hidden heritage, or subterranean places, were decaying or being destroyed by various means, either natural or through vandalism, with the knowledge and history of these places passing only by word of mouth. It was with a sense of urgency, therefore, that he started putting pen to paper in what could only be described as a 'travel diary of underground Shropshire'. As with most other counties, Shropshire has its fair share of 'secret subterranean tunnels', most of these having a basis in the imagination of the storyteller, but some, including such features as the ice houses, cave cottages, rock houses, tunnels, mine ventures, underground temples, grottoes and ornamental caves described within, played a major part in variously providing an underground world of housing, food storage, religious sanctity or entertaining eccentricity in times past.