Staten Island, New York

By Mike Segar

As New York braced for the arrival of Hurricane Sandy three weeks ago, I was in California for a long-planned personal event. But I wasn’t about to miss what was shaping up to be a major story. I was determined to get back. I found a united flight to Detroit, Michigan, that was still listed as “on-time.” How far a drive would that be to New York? 10 hours? Through a hurricane?… I’ll take it, I thought. Seven hours later I was on the ground in Michigan driving through the night towards New York as winds howled and Sandy was coming ashore. I made it back to a region knocked to its knees by this storm.

The next seven days were a blur of finding and photographing those worst hit by the storm and hunting for gas for vehicles to keep going (not to mention returning home to a house without power, heat or hot water and without my wife and children who had evacuated to Massachusetts). Together Reuters photographers Lucas Jackson, Shannon Stapleton, Brendan McDermid, Keith Bedford, Adrees Latif, Andrew Kelly, Tom Mihalek, Carlo Alegri, Steve Nesius, Chip East, Adam Hunger and myself covered the immediate aftermath of Sandy in countless locations. We documented places and people affected by this massive natural disaster, one of the most destructive ever to hit the Northeast U.S. Our team made amazing pictures throughout and our collective photographic documentation of this disaster speaks for itself.

By Mike Segar

Firstly, let me say I am most definitely NOT a New York Yankees fan. I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and have been a devoted Boston Red Sox fan my entire life. The Yankees are our sworn enemies as Red Sox fans and that never changes.

However, in my job as a photographer for Reuters I have covered the Yankees in the MLB playoffs since 1996, when I covered my first New York Yankees World Series championship.

By Mike Segar

For any photojournalist, when you cover events of any kind, be it sports or news or daily life, you really never want to be part of the story. Your assignment; to be present to make the best possible images of the events unfolding in front of you is a privilege, and ideally your only mark on the event itself is to come away with as compelling a visual record of what happened as you can under the byline REUTERS/Mike Segar…

However, sometimes… you just can’t get out of the way.

Photo courtesy of Richard Mackson for USA TODAY Sports

My assignment at the London 2012 Olympics along with my colleague Sergio Perez from Madrid, is basketball; 15 days of basketball games, 6 games a day, as nations compete for the Olympic Gold medal. Even for basketball lovers, that’s a lot of basketball.

By Mike Segar

The photos in this project, conceived ahead of this week’s International AIDS Conference, are not the dramatic, heartbreaking, moving sort that we have been used to seeing of AIDS patients from the ‘80s and ‘90s. What I came to quickly realize is that this story, or I should say this portion of it, is about hope – hope and recovery. Living and learning to live as best one can with a disease the world has come to know all too well as an indiscriminate killer.

Take for example the hope that I saw in the eyes of 40-year-old AIDS patient Bobby Billingsly, a man who was close to death when he arrived at Broadway House in Newark, New Jersey, with a CD4 count near zero in 2009, an indication of what is known as Full blown AIDS.

By Mike Segar

One of the many great things about being a Reuters wire service photographer is the wide spectrum of things that you get to witness and photograph from assignment to assignment. Of course, not every assignment brings you to a place or a situation that excites or moves you emotionally or visually, but over the past week I have had the fortunate experience of shooting two completely different types of assignments that brought me to two completely different experiences.

From the final game of the 2012 NBA finals in Miami last Thursday night where I was front and center to photograph LeBron James and the Miami Heat as they celebrated clinching the title victory over the Oklahoma City Thunder where the pure joy and excitement of sport was on full display, to a far different type of emotion at a New York City prison where inmates earned their high school diplomas.