Mick Deane

Mick Deane, who was shot dead in Cairo earlier this month at the age of 61, was a Sky News cameraman who had covered wars, revolutions and disasters around the world, often at great danger to himself. He was filming clashes between Egyptian security forces and supporters of Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's deposed president, when he was hit and died minutes later.

Mchael Douglas Deane was born in 1951 in Hanover, West Germany, where his father was serving in the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR), but he went to school in Northamptonshire. A born adventurer, he left school early, built his own boat along with a few friends and sailed it in the Mediterranean. He was crewing an air balloon in Rome in the 1970s when he met his future wife Daniela, an Italian-American journalist who worked for the Washington Post.

At her suggestion, he started in journalism as a soundman for CNN, where he learned to operate a camera and, along with correspondent Jim Clancy, covered the Israel invasion of Lebanon in 1982, aimed at ousting the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). It was there, filming Israeli fighter-bombers as they screamed overhead to bomb PLO positions, that he first showed his bravery. Newsmen who have faced such attacks will tell you they are the most frightening of all.

Having been signed up by ITN News for their new Hong Kong bureau in 1988, his telling images helped bring home to viewers in Britain and beyond the horrors of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing the following year, which he covered with reporter Jeremy Thompson, now a stalwart of Sky.

Having, often in awe, watched him work in Beirut, I had the pleasure of working with him on the British Caribbean island of Montserrat in 1997, when the Soufriere Hills volcano wiped out the capital, Plymouth. His footage of surging grey pyroclastic flows of magma rumbling from the volcano and down into the sea, frying everything in their path, were used around the world. By 1997, he had joined Sky, covering the world's hotspots while based in Washington or latterly Jerusalem.

Several years ago, he was diagnosed with kidney cancer, which doctors thought might be terminal, but he continued to work right up until the moment he died. An obituarist described him as "fearless", but he was the first to tell you he was often scared but used his fear as a positive driving force.

The chief of Sky News, John Ryley, said in a video tribute: "Mick was an astonishingly good cameraman who took some brilliant pictures. But he also had a first-class editorial brain. He had brilliant ideas."

Mick Deane is survived by his wife Daniela, a freelance reporter who writes the blog Letter From The Holy Land, and their sons Patrick and Benjamin.