By Kai Pfaffenbach

There are a few things you expect as a German photographer from cozy Frankfurt when your boss sends you to cover the test events for the upcoming 2014 Sochi Olympic winter games in Russia.

Will it be heavy snow and cold you have to brave? How difficult will communication be (as I don’t speak Russian)? How will the general feeling of Russians be about Germans a few days after they celebrated the anniversary of their big victory over Hitler’s sixth army in Stalin-(Wolgo)grad during WWII in 1943? Well, after nine days within the 70km (43 mile) perimeter of the 2014 Olympics I can say it is a bit of everything but it is definitely a balancing act between extremes.

When you read the invitation letter of the Organizing Committee you learn that “Sochi2014 will be the most compact Winter Games in the history of the Olympic Movement”. The Games will be held in two clusters. The coastal cluster where all indoor events (speed skating, curling, ice hockey etc..) will be held and the mountain cluster around the (former) village of Krasnaya Polyana and the alpine resort of Roza Khutor where the outdoor venues are located. When the Games start on February 7, 2014, a new rail track should connect the coastal cluster with the mountains. With less than one year to go construction works are well under way but for now a narrow bumpy road is the one and only way to get up and down. Dozens of tunnels and bridges need to be built through the valley along the “wild water” river. Sometimes it seems bizarre when the graveyard of the little suburban village of Krasnaya Polyana is less than 100 yards away from the Olympic lane.

Its about 50km (31 miles) between the city of “Adler” where the Olympic Park is located and the mountain cluster. The host city of Sochi is another 20km (12 miles) down the road from Adler, located on the coast of the beautiful black sea. In Sochi itself is little to see of the Olympic hysteria, but in and around Adler construction work is more intense than I have ever seen before. Here starts the next balancing act between the extremes: when it doesn’t rain or snow it is so dusty that it is difficult to breathe and when it’s wet literally everything is covered in ugly grey-brown mud.

Mischa, my driver and fixer had difficulties steering his little car around potholes up to 15cm (6 inches) deep when he took me outside the Olympic Park at the seafront near Adler. The architecture of the Olympic stadium looks impressive. It’s an outdoor arena for the opening and closing ceremony and it will be used for football afterwards. Just a stone’s throw away things don’t look as pretty. There are houses which are half demolished on official demand as they are within the perimeter of the Olympic Park, scrapped buses or cars and large piles of garbage just next to people who sell oranges or knitwear on the streets of Adler near the Abchazian border to make a living.

The street vendors seemed to be in a good mood. No wonder, there are enough customers.

There must be tens of thousands of workers on the endless numbers of construction sites between the Olympic Park and the mountain cluster. Some of them are living in containers at the construction site, others share rooms in nearby villages. They wait at their bus stops outside the construction sites covered in dust and mud but most of them with a smile. As far as I could understand from our limited way of communication, the workers seemed to be very proud of being part of the huge crew of people getting Sochi and the Krasnaya Polyana region ready for the big games.

Here comes the next balancing act of extremes: I don’t know why a few police along the road I was taking pictures from – as I was not allowed to enter the construction sites – seemed to be less friendly. They obviously didn’t like the fact I took pictures but in the end they didn’t bother me too much. A few days ago a British colleague wasn’t that lucky. He spent about three hours with the police who tried to explain to him why he shouldn’t photograph from a (public) street: “It is for your own safety”! So we will be very careful and make sure we will not get run over by one of the countless lorries that stir up photographers biggest enemy here so far: dust or muddy spray.

So let’s move to the positive side again: the venues! I photographed the test events in the extreme park (freestyle skiing and snowboard) and the bobsleigh and skeleton World Cup at the sliding center. The facilities above Roza Khutor are (obviously, as there hasn’t been anything here before) brand new and set the highest standards. People from the communications department of the Organizing committee and from the press department were superbly helpful.

No wonder, the photo chief of the Games will be Peter Charles, an Australian who, for years, has worked with and for the IOC. He always tries hard to make the best photo positions available. As much as photographing sports was pure fun, the transport side needs a lot of improvement before next year. Sometimes shuttle buses simply didn’t show up, sometimes drivers went to the wrong hotels or apartment buildings and sometimes we were just missing a little bus stop shelter to take cover from the rain and snow. Given the fact that all the construction here must have cost a massive amount of money, it should be possible to find some more Russian rubles, to get a few bus stop huts installed. If not, a smile would help.

But for the so called “law enforcement crew” it seemed impossible for them to put on anything other than a grim face. Far too many times I simply felt not welcome. For me that was the biggest difference from all the other Olympic cities Reuters has sent me to over the past 13 years.

Some of the young enthusiastic volunteers made up for the lack of kindness: they were happy to show off their English language skills and they were curious to know more about the foreigners visiting their country.

For me the balancing act of extremes continued for the next couple of days starting with the security check at the station at the base of the gondola and ending with a reward on the Roza Peak high above Roza Khutor which offered an incredible overview of one of the nicest skiing resorts I have seen so far.

Less than a year before the opening of the Sochi2014 Olympic Winter Games there is still a way to go. There will be tens of thousands of people who have to work hard to make it happen but weighing the pros and cons I expect it will be an “extremely” good games but it could also be “extremely” difficult if some people here don’t change their approach to the foreigners who will come and take part in this Winter Games.

By Kai Pfaffenbach

For a German sports photographer covering first division Bundesliga soccer, every week between December and the end of January is actually quite boring. While other major leagues (not only in soccer) continue their season, Bundesliga is “off” for four weeks. Although I would normally tend to miss “my“ weekly fix of soccer, I always look forward to the so-called “winter break”. It gives me time to cover one of the sports events I really love to photograph: the four hills ski jumping tournament.

As a young boy watching it on TV, I could never imagine standing on top of such a ski jump. But it was my 14th time this year traveling from Oberstdorf, Germany’s most southern city, where the opening jumping is traditionally held, to Garmisch-Partenkirchen for the “new-year-jumping” on January 1. After those two jumpings in Germany, the tournament convoy rides to Innsbruck in Austria and then the final “epiphany jumping” in Bischofshofen. Four different cities in nine days. Up to 30,000 spectators cheering their heroes when they soar down.

But it seems ski jumping is not very popular overseas. Besides the strong Japanese team, all the top athletes come from central Europe. The top leading nations this winter are Austria, Norway and Germany. No wonder this year’s tournament was a duel between Austria’s ski jumping super star Gregor Schlierenzauer and Norway’s Anders Jacobsen. As wind, snow and rain are new challenges to the athletes during each jumping, it is a great challenge for a photographer to find new angles and develop ideas for “new” pictures.

The officials of the International Ski Federation FIS are incredibly helpful and give me opportunities which I never get anywhere else. They let me mount a camera on a pole behind the jumper to capture the moment before they descend the starting beam. And they allow me to set up a camera directly at the end of the slide track at the so called “jumping table.” It gives you a unique view from “ski-level” and offers the panoramic view the jumper has.

The one and only problem is the speed of the jumpers. They reach almost 100kmh just before they take off and although our cameras have 1/8000 sec as the fastest shutter speed and can take up to 14 images per second you will only have one proper picture of the athlete “taking off.” Using a photoelectric barrier solved the “timing” problem.

Shooting very fast shutter speeds “freeze” such moments, so I decided to go with a very slow shutter speed to show how fast the guys are sliding down the ski jump and soaring through the air. In some situations such photographic tricks make the picture, and in others, the background or special light situations make the difference. For years the main picture from the Innsbruck event showed the jumpers flying over the St. Wilten basilica and its graveyard. Yes, ski jumping is dangerous, but not that crazy.

Unfortunately, there were a few crash landings during this years event again. Germany’s 17-year-old youngster Andreas Wellinger was just about to celebrate a great attempt in Bischofshofen when he fell down and kissed the snow. Luckily he wasn’t injured at all and could start in the second run.

By this time Schlierenzauer and Jacobsen were jumping in their own league. Carefully watched by the judges, who are responsible for good or bad marks, they were pushing each other to longer and wider jumps. In the end Jacobsen won the first two jumpings in Germany, while Schlierenzauer won twice on his Austrian home turf. As the ranking is a result of jumping length and judgement points added up from all four jumpings, it was Schlierenzauer who celebrated his great triumph and won the tournament for the second time in a row.

By Kai Pfaffenbach

To watch a car race on television from a comfortable couch is fun, but to cover a Formula One Grand Prix as a photographer at the track is always thrilling. It is fast, exiting and produces nice pictures (most of the time). As I have covered quite a lot F1 races across Europe over the past 17 years with Reuters, I would never have imagined that my most exciting experience as a photographer in connection with F1 would be the public viewing of the last race of this season.

Germany’s Sebastian Vettel was leading the driver’s ranking 13 points ahead of his Spanish rival Fernando Alonso when the starting lights went green on the Interlagos circuit for the Grand Prix of Brazil in Sao Paulo. More than 2000 people were waiting for that moment in Heppenheim, the hometown of Red Bull driver Vettel, who has won the last two driver championships. The inhabitants of Heppenheim, also fondly known as Vettelheim, were in an easy mood when Vettel got ready in the fourth position on the starting grid, while Alonso started in eighth. Just a few seconds later emotions were turned upside down.

The German got off to a poor start and to make matters worse was in a collision with Brazilian Bruno Senna’s Williams that left him facing the wrong way with a damaged car. The cheering turned into praying…

Even the greatest optimists started to loose confidence. Everybody had simply expected just a big party to celebrate Vettel’s third consecutive Championship. As Red Bull team principal Christian Horner informed Sebastian via their radio that “There is visible damage, it is not the front wing, we cannot fix it,” some of the Vettel fans almost fainted!

Members of Vettel’s supporter’s club were holding hands, others closed their eyes – it seemed that his car would last only a few more rounds. Yet four laps later after being assured by the Red Bull technical head the data looked good, he drove faster and faster. Confidence gained. The public viewing room swelled with expectation and relief and the cheering went up again.

Despite the hoards of camera teams and photojournalists standing between the spectators and the huge viewing screen, with the people in the front row hardly being able to see the race, nobody got aggressive. I have covered similar public viewing sessions on soccer events and most people get very aggressive against members of the media, but the Formula One supporters understood our needs to cover their emotions which were changing from lap to lap.

The safety car came out for the first time, there were bungled pitstops, crashes, collisions, and constant uncertainty about the weather with black clouds overhead. The confidence of all Vettel supporters shifted from full to empty.

The safety car came out for a second period, and exactly when nobody expected it, it seemed like Vettel was driving on rail tracks – Heppenheim went ballistic!

It was clear, no overtaking was allowed, Alonso couldn’t win the race and Vettel took it home by securing his sixth place. There are few words to describe the relief of the people attending the public viewing. A few were not able to express their joy and just sat staring at the screen. Others were jumping onto each other and didn’t stop singing “We are the champions”.

After a wet and wild Brazilian Grand Prix rollercoaster and after what must have been one of the most nerve-racking races of his career, Sebastian Vettel became Formula One’s youngest triple world champion at the age of 25. Only two other drivers ever in history have managed to achieve three title in a row – the late Juan Manuel Fangio and Vettel’s compatriot seven-times champion Michael Schumacher.

I have to admit that it was pure fun to take pictures in this mayhem and I have never felt closer to any given assignment despite the fact I was thousands of miles away. Congratulations “finger boy”! You deserve this title hat-trick and I am looking forward to taking your photographs when you come for a party with your friends in “Vettelheim”!

There were other big names supposed to be the super stars of this Euro 2012 – Portugal’s Christiano Ronaldo, Germany’s Bastian Schweinsteiger, Holland’s Robin van Persie or France’s Franck Ribery – they have all flown home by now and before the final between Spain and Italy there is only one guy left who will be recognized as the tournament’s big star: Mario Balotelli from Italy.

What a story. Adopted from African parents when he was three, brought up by Italian foster parents and now one of the most recognized strikers playing for England’s champions Manchester City and the man who brought Italy into the final with his two striking goals against an agonized German squad in the semi-final.

Covering all major soccer tournaments and big finals for the last 15 years I can’t remember one player who fascinates the media and fans like him. And it’s not only about the way he plays. The number of his nicknames seems endless. Super-Mario, after the popular video-game star, Balla-Balla Balotelli, as he is well known for his jokes with team mates or Mad Mario, as he gets quite furious on the pitch (he faced four red cards during the last Premier League) season.

After the semi-final he added another one himself: the postman! A journalist asked why he did not celebrate after his second goal against the Germans. He simply answered that it is his job to score goals and the postman delivering the daily mail does not celebrate at each end every letter box. Seconds of silence and then a big laugh of the media. But as much as they love him, they are also in some kind of conflict with him all the time. One Italian sport paper showed him in a cartoon as King Kong shaking Big Ben when Italy played England in their quarter finals – a lot other countries considered this as racism. The postman took it with a smile and delivered.

For a photographer he is a perfect subject to follow. He shows emotions, argues and plays with great engagement. When he scored his first goal of the semi-final against “my” German team he started his celebration and ran past our captain Phillip Lahm, making him look like a little school boy. We have this proverb saying: “Good boys go to heaven – bad boys make it everywhere” – in this case into the final….

So no matter which team will win and which will lose – Balotelli will be a big part of the final showdown and makes it into the papers on Monday again.

As a news photographer working for Reuters in Germany it is quite normal to spend some time in your car. It is not unusual to drive between 3000-5000km per month. So I expected nothing different when coming to Poland for the Euro 2012 covering the soccer matches in Warsaw and Gdansk. During our tournament planning we agreed on traveling in a big van with our team of three photographers and one technician. That seemed a lot easier than spending more time getting all the equipment to an airport than actually flying.

Four times we had to hit the road towards Gdansk and back to Warsaw. About 360km one way shouldn’t last longer than 3 to 4 hours. “It’s about the ride from Frankfurt to Munich to cover some soccer at Allianz Arena. Entering the highway in Frankfurt and three hours later you take the exit in front of the stadium”, I thought to myself. As a matter of fact our trips were different and we experienced quite a few new things on our journey – everything in an absolutely positive way. Even though there’s not much of a highway to begin with, we had a lot to see. In retrospect we divided the trip in three parts.

Part 1: the strawberry and cherry alley – not one or two people were offering self-harvested fruits here, but dozens. They displayed the freshly picked fruits on the hood of their cars, sitting next to it under a sunshade waiting for customers. Of course we took the opportunity, made a good deal and used the strawberries for a refreshing milkshake after coming back. Some refreshment was needed as the drive on the country road is somewhat challenging as well. Some Polish drivers are very “creative” when using the space of only two lanes. It is nothing special if you face three cars driving towards you next to each other. Thank god that didn’t lead directly into the next part of our journey….

Part 2: the graveyard alley – maybe that sounds a bit strange but it was very striking how many graveyards we could see left and right from the streets. The special thing was the size of those graveyards. Using the country road for almost 120km we drove through villages having just two rows of houses left and right from the street but a graveyard double the size of the village. Talking about that during our first trips we decided to look around at two or three of them on our last trip back home from Gdansk.

It was Saturday morning and it seemed that all villagers were coming to the graveyard to maintain the graves of their loved ones. As the line up of the graves looks a bit chaotic (there is almost no space between the graves facing in all different directions) the people spent a lot of time and effort to keep the graveyards in good shape.

Not only one, but three or more candles on the graves, fresh colorful flower bouquets everywhere created a friendly atmosphere at what is usually a sad place. People were friendly (that was nothing unusual as about 95 percent of the Polish people we have met during the past three weeks were not only friendly but very nice and helpful), nodded with a smile as we walked around the graveyard with the cameras getting a picture here and there.

During one of our visits we found out why the graveyards seem to be big compared to the villages. People told me that smaller villages nearby also use the graveyards and lots of the graves stay for a long time.

In my home country Germany most of the people let the graves clear after a while (let’s say an average of 20 years). Here in Poland it is a good tradition that you keep the grave of your relatives as long as possible. As a proverb says; from the way people treat their dead we can observe how they live together. This provides further certification that the Polish are very friendly hosts – not only for this tournament
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Part 3: high noon on the highway: the brand new highway A1 led us from Torun all the way up to Gdansk. For just 28 zloty you drive 150km on a perfect road with most exits still closed (as it is too new). But it would not have matched our colorful road book if we wouldn’t have discovered something different to our home countries again. In Switzerland, where my colleague Pascal Lauener is from and Leonhard Foeger’s home country Austria the workers on the side of the highways would use large tractors to mow the grass, as they would do in Germany. The disadvantage of using heavy equipment: the result always looks a bit sloppy and you might kill some animals in the high grass. The Polish found a different solution. In groups of up to 20 people they use a motor scythe and just walk along the highway. The result is impressive: it looks almost like riding through a golf course fairway!

Our Gdansk trips are done and we will wait in Warsaw for Germany’s semi final having one or two days off. I will spend one of these days to drive to Auschwitz. I haven’t been there and want to face the memorial of the darkest part of Germany’s history. I am sure this will not be a colorful and joyful trip but I will be as grateful for this experience as for the incredible great time I have had in Poland so far.

Being a Reuters photographer means you travel a lot. War zones, disasters or political visits are on your list. By far the most exiting events – for me – are still the big sports events. 2012 offers a nice variety and the Euro 2012 soccer tournament will be an excellent warm up for the Olympic games to follow shortly in London.

Although I’ve followed the German team in previous tournaments this time it’s a different approach for me to cover the tournament. With my colleagues Pascal Lauener from Switzerland, Austria’s chief photographer Leo Foeger and our technician Gilles de Queiros from France I’m covering the games in Warsaw and Gdansk. With the complicated history of Poland’s and Germany’s relationship in mind I started this trip with different expectations and was wondering if our Polish hosts had any prejudices against Germans. Let’s not forget the first shots of World War II were fired at Gdansk (then Danzig) in September, 1939.

After five days of work in both cities my first resume is very clear: it is a great pleasure to be here! Beside some serious security officers at the Gdansk stadium (they decided to trade their smile in for the uniform) all the people we met were incredibly nice, friendly and gave us a very warm welcome. Volunteers in the stadium, young soccer fans in and around the stadiums or the sales people at the local supermarket seem to like especially the German soccer team. Obviously it helps that two of Germany’s best players are born in Poland. Lukas Podolski and Miroslav “Mirek” Klose are as popular as Poland’s own soccer heroes Kuba Blasczikowski and Robert Lewandowski who play for German soccer champion Borussia Dortmund. It especially helps when they train in tops saying “I like it!” in Polish.

After Poland’s 1-1 draw jn the opening game against Greece they have to play a strong team from Russia who defeated Czech Republic unexpectedly by 4-1! The relationship between Poland and Russia doesn’t seem to be the best at the moment. The violent attacks by Russian hooligans against stewards in the stadium during their first game didn’t really help to garner sympathy.

As photographers we have to prepare for this game in a completely different way to previous matches. So, we will cover the day with two teams. One team inside the stadium looking after the match and a team outside, looking at the fan zones and checking the situation around the arena.

Football, or “soccer” for our American friends, is the top sport in Europe. With the Euro 2012 tournament in Ukraine and Poland later this year we are expecting another sports highlight just before the Olympics in London. Sixteen teams will fight for the European title and after their good performance at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, Germany is amongst the favorites for this event. Title holder and World Champion Spain, Holland and France are on the bookmaker’s shortlists as well.

With the big tournament to come I had asked the team press spokesman a while back if I could get some behind the scenes access on Germany’s road to the final in Kiev. It was a big surprise when I finally got the opportunity granted to shoot the set up in the dressing room for an upcoming game. Almost 40,000 spectators in the newly renovated stadium of Bremen were expecting a great test match between Germany and France. By that time I was inside the catacombs of the stadium where even TV is usually banned from. You will never make it past all the security standing around without very special permission.

Entering the dressing room, or should I say “dressing hall”, was really different to any other sport venue I had seen before. Each and every player has his own personal space; one match dress on a hanger, a second one lying on his seat.

The carefully polished boots were lined up under the seats. German defender Dennis Aogo had – beside his individually painted shin pads – three pairs of boots.

Top midfielder Mesut Oezil from Real Madrid only had one purple colored pair of boots ready for the game.

The captain’s armband – this night for Miroslav Klose – was prominently hanging on the locker next to a pennant which the captain’s of both teams traditionally exchange before the game.

The whole set up looked extremely well organized and clinically clean. Two members of Germany’s soccer association (DFB) need about one hour to carry half a dozen big metal boxes with all the equipment into the dressing room and to set up each player’s space individually. Boots, shorts, warm-up outfits or the special gloves for the goalkeepers – nothing is missing in this logistical operation.

As some players have the names of their wife, girlfriend or children stitched on their boots, others need a second or third pair of socks to feel comfortable running over a wet and slippery pitch.

Should some of the players get hungry during warm up they can easily make use of a buffet offering bananas, dried fruit, sparkling or still mineral water.

It is really a set-up for Champions and the young players don’t need to worry about anything. When they arrive aboard the team bus about 75 minutes ahead of the match they just have to bring their personal toiletry bag (preferred are posh brands from France and Italy) to get in style after the game.

This time the perfect preparations didn’t help my German team. Even missing some of the key players due to injuries it was no excuse for a poor performance as France took a 2-1 victory in Bremen and left a sadly disappointed German coach Jogi Loew on his bench.

Of course I left a lot less disappointed after catching this rare glance behind the scenes and wish “my” team (sorry for that patriotic statement) all the best for the upcoming tournament. Maybe there will be a second chance for me to sneak in before the Euro final in Kiev on July 1…

We Germans (at least most of us) seem to be well organized, diligent, reliable, politically correct and ready to help, even with our money. But there is one thing we Germans are prejudiced for – our lack of humor.

It looks like for that reason “Carnival” was invented.

Okay, that’s not true. About 600 years ago, people started big celebrations for the last days before Ash Wednesday and the end of the Christian period of fasting. To get better control of those festivities authorities “organized” Carnival. Over the years it became more and more popular to wear funny costumes.

As people behind masks cannot be easily recognized, the “Political Carnival” was invented and in the city of Mainz (the capital of Germany’s state of Rhineland Palatinate) the Rose Monday parade was used to disparage politicians since 1843.

This part of the Rose Monday parade still seems to have the same creative people building big carnival floats depicting our politicians. The absolute highlight of this year’s parade in Mainz was a huge papier-mache figure showing German President Christian Wulff hanging in the ropes of a ring as a shattered boxer.

For more than two months Wulff was under heavy criticism in German media for his (too) close contacts to business people and as state prosecutors announced official investigations, he stepped down last Friday. The builders of the carnival float reacted extremely fast and the (former) President was simply “knocked out” instead of “only” being shattered beforehand.

Not less creative was a float showing the rating agencies “Fitch”, “Moody’s” and “Standard & Poor’s” as little boys using sling shots to shoot at the euro.

Another papier-mache figure depicts German Chancellor Angela Merkel handing rescue packages (symbolized in the shape of umbrellas) to Greek, Portuguese and Spanish people. So far, so good!

But there is one thing in this whole carnival which I don’t get at all: why are people wearing those traditional uniforms (like soldiers in medieval times), walking in marching steps and trying to look funny and serious at the same time?

If you ask both women and men about their motivations you will find out: Carnival is a serious thing. For them it is more of an obligation to take part in the parade. This seems to be the case for many of the spectators as well. They argue with others about their spots (just because they stood on the very same spot for the Rose Monday parades for the last 20 years or so) and they are very serious about their (non-existant) costumes: a funny (let’s say silly) hat does the trick and people consider themselves Carnival revelers. Alcohol provides the necessary comfort to listening to awful pop songs and with the sun out (like this year) nothing is stopping them until Ash Wednesday.

Even in Frankfurt’s stock exchange it’s all about Carnival. Not on Rose Monday, but the day after. Stock traders show up in costumes, disco music sounds over the trading floor and sparkling wine replaces coffee for breakfast.

Overall it doesn’t seem to be a “big deal” this year, as trading in the times of a worldwide economic crisis is “quiet”, as a trader said before he adjusts his carnival hat and turns back to the trading terminal.

For certain people it is a real transformation from being as bourgeois as possible or business-style serious to letting their hair down. I find this strange and so I have my own prejudice: yes, there are a lot of Germans around with a huge lack of a sense of humor.

And those who have a good sense of humor don’t like the narrow-minded carnival but the creative criticism of the authorities.

Steve Marcus, our Boxing expert in Las Vegas, is maybe the one and only photographer within the company who has shot more World Championship title bouts than I have throughout the last couple of years.

I shot “Iron” Mike Tyson in Copenhagen, South Africa’s “White Buffalo” Francois Botha on several comebacks, I got my picture taken with Lennox Lewis after a fight I photographed and I followed the untouchable Klitschko brothers on their way to dominate the heavyweight class as only “The Greatest of All Times” (Muhammad Ali) did before!

But it was an IBF cruiserweight re-match which fascinated me the most. Steve “USS” Cunningham challenged Yoan-Pablo Hernandez from Cuba to get his title-belt back. Cruiserweight is as fast as middle-weight but the punch power is almost as much as heavyweight.

From the first second those two men delivered an absolutely top-level fight with clean technique, accurate, fast hits and the ability to take those punches. It was in the fourth round when a combination and a straight right hand sent Cunningham on the deck twice within a minute.

None of the almost 10,000 spectators and experts in the arena expected him to “survive” the round or come back for a fifth. But this man did come back and delivered another eight rounds, pushing himself and title-holder Hernandez to the limit.

People were obviously standing on their chairs (I’ve heard that later from a TV commentator as I couldn’t take a look over my shoulder during the actual fight), cheering for both fighters waiting for a knock-out to come. In the end the fight lasted its twelve rounds, Hernandez defended his title by a 3-0 judge decision but he was too exhausted to climb on the ropes to acknowledge his well deserved applause. Hernandez enjoyed a kiss from his girlfriend as Cunningham tried to stop his cuts from bleeding.

From the photographer’s point of view this fight was another debut for me – I’ve never ever on any given assignment needed the full capacity of a 4GB memory card. But the amount of punches and reactions during those 50 minutes were just too good to be true.

Usually I shoot the first two rounds on a 70-200mm zoom-lens to get the fighters a bit closer. For this one I decided within the first minutes to stay on the two wide-angle zooms: 24-70/2.8 and 16-35/2.8 as the fight was like a wild fast race through the ring.

In the end even the shirt of referee James Cotton told the story of the fight of their lives for these two boxers: in his bloodstained shirt the “Ref” stood in the corner, winking to me as I shot the close-up of his shirt and saying with a smile: “Looks like I fought for the belt myself” – and so did I.

The use of photographs showing global climate change, industries’ increasing emissions and its effect on our environment is growing rapidly.

Looking for different images Eastern Europe Chief Photographer Pawel Kopczynski came across thermal imaging technology and bought one of these cameras that shows different temperature levels. The camera was sent to my Frankfurt office with a short and easy job description: “Kai, play around with the camera and make good use of it”. After getting familiar with the technology (the first time ever in my career I had to read a 200 page manual) and taking a few silly shots of houses in the neighborhood I made up my mind to start a tour through southern Germany, shooting the nuclear and coal power plants of the region.

The thermal imaging camera is not comparable to a “normal” camera we use day to day. It looks a lot more like the radar guns that police use to catch speeding car drivers. To make it look even more strange you can use a laser pointer for better targeting. No wonder power plant security was after me within a minute as I stood on a street about 500 yards away from the nuclear power plant in Phillipsburg near Karlsruhe to get my first shots. After a few minutes of negotiations they realized I was not coming up with some rocket launching laser system. After crosschecking my passport and press-pass details they took me off their personal list of “terrorist suspects”.

I expected a huge visible difference between temperature inside one of the domes covering the nuclear heart of the power plant, and the outside. Surprisingly, that wasn’t the case and it looks like the massive concrete walls are doing their job.

The most interesting job using the camera came last week. The last transport of the so-called “Castor” (Cask for Storage and Transport of Radioactive material) containers was scheduled from a reprocessing center in France to the waste storage facility of Gorleben in the northeastern part of Germany. Tens of thousands of protesters in France and Germany tried to block the transport which is mainly done by train. I usually cover the unrest along the track but this time I had a completely different challenge.

As the train parked just after crossing the French/German border near Saarbruecken I got to the scene with the thermal imaging camera to get a few scenery shots of the train carrying eleven “Castor”- containers. The temperature difference this time was clearly visible: those containers are sealed at the highest level to prevent any radiation from getting into the environment but the nuclear material is still producing an enormous amount of heat. You can see this on the thermal images very clearly. Despite the pictures not showing dangerous levels of radiation you can still imagine that the Castor containers with its radioactive waste glowing.

Usually I am quite open in sharing tips and tricks about photography with my colleagues even from competitive agencies. But this time I didn’t allow them to shoot over my shoulder as they tried to get screenshots from my “radar gun”, realizing that these thermal images impressively illustrated the ride of this “radiating train”.

The only short fall of the camera is its very small image resolution. Less than one mega pixel is not what we are used to these days. On the other hand we are not talking about “normal” jpeg photography. The thermal image is written in a special profile which is then needed to be converted into a bitmap file before we can use it as a jpeg to deliver it to our clients, who made very good use of the pictures.