By Beawiharta

I think this has been my hardest assignment to get photos since I began working for Reuters.

Wednesday Wednesday afternoon at the office I received news that a Russian Sukhoi Superjet 100 passenger plane with 46 people on board had lost contact with air traffic control at Jakarta’s Halim Perdana Kusuma airport during their demonstration flight over Mount Salak. After more than four hours of no contact, it meant the aircraft was lost, crashed or had made an emergency landing. I decided to spend the night at the office to figure out the fastest options for covering the Sukhoi news, and to prepare all the camera equipment in the pictures vehicle. After a discussion with Heru Asprihanto from TV and Indonesia bureau chief Matthew Bigg, we decided to wait until morning to head to the the nearby location Mount Salak.

Thursday After taking photos in the morning of volunteers preparing to climb Salak Mountain, I received information that the Sukhoi aircraft had crashed after hitting a slope atop Mount Salak. For Indonesians, it is common for aircraft to hit the mountain. Since 2004, four aircraft have crashed there, the worst an Indonesian air force aircraft in 2008 that killed 18 soldiers on board.

After eating lunch, I joined the first rescue team heading to the crash site. The team said it would need two to three hours to climb to the crash site from our position. I thought I would need between four to six hours to climb up and walk back down, before managing to send pictures to the desk at around 6pm local time. I joined the team, deciding not to carry a laptop and sat phone in order to lighten the baggage that I was carrying while climbing. It would also prevent any damage to the equipment should I fall. I had five chocolate bars, 1.5 liters of water, two camera bodies and three lenses, alongside a pocket knife, headlamp and rain coat in my backpack.

By Beawiharta

I remember well the 2004 tsunami in Aceh. I stayed for more than six weeks in Banda Aceh and then flew back to Jakarta to recover. In Jakarta, I cried everywhere when nobody was around me; at the office, at home, on the street, I was always crying. The situation was embarrassing, but I couldn’t stop the tears. They were automatic.

My brain couldn’t run from the images that I took of the tsunami aftermath. The counselor told me that I must go back to Aceh to take different pictures; positive pictures. Like people building their houses or shop stalls, children going back to school or singing songs happily.

Last week, I flew back to Aceh to cover the 8.6 magnitude earthquake. When I heard confirmation that there was no resulting tsunami, I was happy because I would not be taking pictures of sadness again here, in Aceh.

By Beawiharta

On Wednesday morning I received an image on my twitter feed (@beawiharta). It was a photo from a local newspaper that showed a student crossing a river on a collapsed bridge. The picture caught me. I needed to find out where it was so I could go there to capture it.

Shortly afterwards I arrived at the office. I had forgotten about the collapsed bridge because we were very busy. I had two assignments for the day, a breast milk courier story and a story about Indonesia’s rising investment rating. This was a big financial story because Moody’s ratings agency restored Indonesia debt to investment grade.

I went to Jakarta’s business district to find photos of middle-class workers returning to their homes. When I had finished, I realized that I had something different to shoot for the next day. I searched Google maps to find the location of the collapsed bridge but I couldn’t find the exact location. There was a blank map with only the name of the village, Sanghiang Tanjung. Surprisingly, it said the village was just 130 kms (80 miles) away from our Jakarta office – a travel time of about two hours. My estimation was it would take 4 hours.

3am Thursday morning, my friend and driver Soewarno and I headed to the village. We reached by 6am. But the difficulty was this village was just a blank area on the map. Also, we had to find the right direction that the students would take, so that I could take a pictures from the front, not from the back. We found many roads in the village but no one knew where the bridge was. With the help of my friends, we were able to get the name of the head of the village, Epi Sopian, who accompanied us to the location. Edi said the bridge collapsed during Saturday’s big flood when wood and bamboo hit the suspension bridge’s pillar.

By Beawiharta

Walking with two cameras, a small bag and a ladder is a daily activity for me. But today, I have a different assignment. I must change into a different kind of clothing to cover the marriage of GKR Bendara (youngest daughter of Yogyakarta King Sultan Hamengkubuwono X) to her husband KPH Yudanegara.

Since it’s not an ordinary assignment, today I will need more help in dressing for the wedding ceremony. Usually I wear something simple, but now I need something more traditional. Out of respect to the old traditions of my country, I figure I must dress the part or else I won’t be able to take pictures inside the palace.

The wedding ceremonies don’t happen in just one day, but over the course of three days. Sultan Hamengkubuwono X spread out the 4,000 invitations across two receptions in two different palaces, as well as stationed around 200 street food vendors to serve people out in the streets.

My concerns are not with the reception, but with the Javanese ceremonies during the wedding. The wedding is in Yogyakarta Palace, the center of Javanese culture. The palace has been the capital of the Yogyakarta Kingdom since 1755 with Sultan Hamengkubuwo X as the 10th king of the kingdom.

We took off smoothly for the short flight from Singapore to Jakarta, and I started falling asleep. Suddenly I was woken up by the sound of two bangs, like a bomb or truck tire blowing out. My wife gripped my hand and asked “Do you smell something burning?” Yes, there was a sharp smell stinging my nose. I realized there was something wrong because all the stewardesses ran back with the food carts.

The plane started to vibrate, harder and harder. I held my wife’s hand tightly and looked at her face as she started praying. My two younger children were asleep, after their first ever trip abroad, but not Pradipta, the eldest one. “Pra look through the window and watch outside,” I said. “I see light, I see fire, I see fire,” he said. Then the electricity was switched off.

I realized the plane, an Airbus A330, had a big problem. I was afraid because I thought we would die. Pradipta looked into my eyes and asked: “Will we die?” I was afraid and could not answer the question. I looked at all my children’s faces and held my lovely wife’s hands tightly.

During my many years of assignments as a Reuters photojournalist, when flying I have imagined being on a plane that had a problem that forced an emergency landing, and then taking pictures. But I never imagined this situation with my family. But it happened. We will die together, so we can fly to heaven together, I thought. If we die together, I will not miss my wife’s delicious cooking, I will not miss the smell of my kids’ sweat. There will be no tears among us. My thoughts, to my surprise, stopped me being afraid any more.

“Will we die?” Pradipta asked again. I looked into his eyes, held his hand tightly and said: “No, we’re alive, we’re still alive,” then I gave him a high five just as if we were playing basketball.

I want to share my experiences photographing Mount Merapi’s volcanic eruptions in Indonesia but I will say upfront that this won’t be a blog about suffering. There won’t be stories of those who have lost their homes, of painful deaths, of burns, of the death of valuable cattle or the destruction the volcano has caused.

Instead, this will be a blog about the logistics of getting great pictures in a dangerous situation.

Taking snaps of Merapi’s lava-flow at night is a great assignment for a news photographer but first, I needed to find an ideal spot to take pictures.

After scouting around, I come across Sidorejo village about four to five kilometers from Merapi’s angry peak.

After the last house on the outskirts of Sidorejo, there are no lamp lights, electricity poles or telephone cables that may ruin my photos. And the pictures would be protected from the light pollution of houses and vehicles. Plus, the open street lay-out positions the peak of Merapi and its crater at the middle of the frame. It’s perfect.

I joined a Greenpeace tour flying over Sumatra Island to take pictures of their protest over forest destruction.

Five photographers and a TV cameraman set off early in the morning, while it was still dark, in a new, single-propeller aircraft. No one told me it would be nearly three hours to get to Jambi on a small plane with no toilet. Luckily for me I had an empty bottle as an emergency measure.

This was the first time I’ve taken aerial shots, so I took so many types of pictures. I took every single detail that caught my eye — forest, reflected light from the sun during sunrise, palm oil plantations, river, sea,  houses, everything.  When we started to take pictures, all five photographers jostled around one opened window. The wind blew very hard, pushing the glass against my face. After one hour, one of the other photographers gave up, and had to take a rest after throwing up all his breakfast. That made me happy – more room for me to take pictures.

In the afternoon when we flew back to Jakarta, I checked my pictures and the dominant images I had were of deforestation, palm oil plantation and acacia forest for paper.  One image stands out to me, a  clearing in the tropical rain forest in a heart shape, my heart is broken for the loss of the tropical rain forest.

Acacia forest and palm oil plantations dominated my pictures. So that’s how it remained in my mind: Sumatra had recently become just palm oil plantations and acacia forest.

Today I returned to Aceh, determined to take pictures of the same locations my team and I had photographed five years ago, when the capital Banda Aceh was completely devastated by a tsunami. At the time, I was with two Reuters journalists from the Jakarta bureau.

We landed at Aceh’s Sultan Iskandar Muda airport on December 27, 2004 – one day after the giant waves paralyzed the city, previously unaware of what a tsunami could do to a city. Information from Banda Aceh in the first few days after the disaster was very limited. It dawned on us later that the lack of news from Banda Aceh was because all of the communication facilities had been damaged.

The airport was oddly quiet. A few wounded victims were waiting for flights to take them out of Aceh. The car park was empty and we couldn’t find cars or taxis. We spotted an ambulance parked outside, so we asked the driver to take us to the city.

The owner of the vehicle was Kak Nur. Nur, a common name for Indonesian women that means light in Arabic, while “Kak” is an Indonesian reference to sister.

Just before we boarded the ambulance, Kak Nur stopped short. She said she would only take us on one condition; that we send news and photos to Jakarta that day. Otherwise, we must find ourselves other transportation. “The devastation in Aceh is vast and large,” she explained, adding that the whole of Aceh would not be able to repair the city. “Not even the whole of Indonesia can clean this city up,” she said. This was the first information about the tsunami that I had heard that day.

“There are too many damaged buildings, garbage and corpses. The people of Aceh need all the help we can get”, she said. “Your duty is to spread the word to the world what has happened to Aceh.”

We agreed. Nine of us boarded the ambulance, six local journalists and three from Reuters, cramped in beside a gurney used to transfer dead bodies onto the ambulance.

At an Indonesian center for mental patients run by the Galuh Foundation, I found Totok.  A patient who had just taken his morning shower and shaved. Totok used to be a thug in a market, and was feared for his habit of beating up vendors. One day, the vendors’ anger peaked and they beat Totok  up, leaving him with physical injuries and mental damage.

I read about the foundation in a local newspaper, in an article about a wedding between a  female patient and an employee of the foundation. The foundation was set up in 1982 by Gendu Mulatif in Bekasi, on the outskirts of Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta. Mulatif used his money to build a compound to take care of homeless patients who had been taken in from the streets. Once admitted, he treated them with medicinal herbals and changed their diet to vegetarian.

Head nurse Suharyono (L) and Suharyoso (R) bring in a man suffering from mental illness (C) shortly after finding him at a street in East Bekasi, outskirt of Jakarta November 5, 2009.  REUTERS/Beawiharta

The conditions at the foundation are a far cry from the centers funded by the government. Only a few walls separate the modest building, which houses a kitchen, a laundry room, the officers and the patients.