Just how brutal should a picture be?

Reports of a bomb blast in Pakistan come into the newsroom. Sadly nothing new. Dinner guests and casual acquaintances within earshot never cease to be shocked when they hear me ask on the phone: “How many dead? Who are they and where was the blast?” It shouldn’t matter, but it does when it comes to news coverage.

Photographers are dispatched, and with cameras crashing about on their backs ride hell for leather on small motorbikes to get to the blast scene before security cordons off the area. The coverage plan is usually the same. One photographer goes to the blast scene, another goes to the hospital. The desk in Islamabad can do nothing but wait and monitor the wires, amid a strange calm. All Reuters photographers are trained to deal with hazardous environments. They are issued with safety equipment. They know the risks. But they all feel lucky … and they all feel immortal.

Reuters reports… 18:27 05Feb10 -Blast in Pakistan commercial capital Karachi-police KARACHI, Feb 5 (Reuters) – A blast went off in Pakistan’s commercial capital Karachi on Friday and police said casualties were feared. A police official Aamir Farooqi said it took place on a main road. “We fear casualties,” he told Reuters.

Photographers are called, they are on the way, one to the bomb blast scene, one to the hospital. Be safe, be fast, be lucky.

from Africa News blog:

PHOTOBLOG: Children in Kenya and Haiti forced to grow up fast, if they survive

I had a flashback the other day when I was looking at photographs from Haiti of 15-year-old Fabianne Geismar, shot dead in the head after stealing wall hangings from a Port-au-Prince store, crushed in the Jan. 12 earthquake.

The image of Fabianne sprawled on the ground, blood trailing over the paintings she'd grabbed, took me back to my own childhood in Nairobi and the sight of a 7- or 8-year-old-boy - probably the same age as me at the time - who was caught stealing sweets from a street vendor and was beaten and burnt with rubber tyres. They called it mob justice.

REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins

To this day, I'll never understand why that poor boy had to die such a violent and senseless death for something so trivial. I feel the same way about Fabianne - she survived one of the most catastrophic events in living memory, only to be shot in the head for petty theft. And for stealing wall hangings where there are no walls.

Remembering the Concorde crash

On July 25, 2000, I had returned to Paris after four weeks of covering the Tour de France and was in the office waiting for my flight back to my home base Nice. It was a quiet day for news and that afternoon I relaxed in the office.

Paris photographer Philippe Wojazer told me, “because it’s quiet, there isn’t any need for the two of us here, I’m going back to my place.” I remember seeing him take his motorbike helmet and then seeing a news flash that said, “Plane crash at Roissy.” The adrenaline was pumping in the office when a second news flash announced “It is a Concorde.”

Philippe told me to head to Roissy on a motorbike with a driver and he would stay at the office to receive my photos. On the way to Roissy, I could see a column of smoke in the distance. Immediately I realized the severity of the situation and the fact that it was a Concorde heightened the news value of the event. Quickly we arrived close to the crash site but it was already surrounded by police who had blocked access to the area and the surrounding two miles.

Asia’s largest solar power plant

Nicky Loh presents a series of time-lapse sequences of a solar power plant in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

Asia’s Largest Solar Power Plant in Kaohsiung, Taiwan from Nicky Loh on Vimeo.

The first time lapse sequence was shot over a period of one hour at 1 frame every two seconds on a lens baby. I chose to use still photography to capture the time lapse over video as the movement of the panels was so small that a continuous one hour raw video file on the 5D MKII would have crashed my computer.

from Russell Boyce:

A Shanghai sinking – an aerial perspective

Checking through the file this picture by Reuters Shanghai based photographer Aly Song really caught my eye and I needed to think why.

 A view shows a sinking cargo ship after it collided with a boat on Huangpu River in Shanghai February 1, 2010. Three sailors were  rescued from the accident, while further investigation is underway, according to local media. REUTERS/Aly Song

Haiti, destroyed and desperate

I crossed the border into Haiti from the Dominican Republic 36 hours after the earthquake hit. As we drove closer to Port-au-Prince, we began to see scenes of destruction and suffering, which only multiplied as we entered the city covered in smoke and in shock.

  My first sensation was of absolute powerlessness; the pain, chaos and destruction were so overwhelming it seemed impossible to register it all. It was hard to know where to start, to find the exact words to describe everything that was happening and continues to happen. To translate all that it into images is a huge challenge.

  I had never been in a tragedy of this magnitude, or seen anything close. Every day that passed we realized the dimension of the destruction was even greater. Every time I explored what was behind a wall, in a garden or a plaza, inside a field hospital or in the ruins of a house, there would be more children who urgently needed food and medicine, more desperate men and women with no hope for the future.

  The whole city is an immense refugee camp without basic services, water, electricity, or toilets, that disappears at night in the darkness of ruins. There is the impression of statelessness, of an absence of institutions to help or oversee.   The extreme poverty of Haiti compounds the problem. An earthquake here may be worse than practically anywhere on earth, because the houses were constructed with cheap materials, on dangerous slopes, without building codes. There were no emergency services capable of responding.

Scenes from Haiti

The numbers from Haiti are staggering. Authorities say the death toll is likely to be between 100,000 and 200,000. Already, 75,000 bodies have been buried in mass graves. 1.5 million residents are homeless . Families have been torn apart. Neighborhoods have been flattened. The government has nearly ceased to exist. But numbers can tell only a small part of the story. Scenes of the devastation in Haiti are filling airwaves and newspapers around the world, triggering a flood of compassion and donations.

Click here for a selection of some of the most striking images captured by our own Reuters’ photographers.

An injured child receives medical treatment in Port-au-Prince, January 13, 2010. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

Residents walk next to a dead body in Port-au-Prince, January 13, 2010. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

from FaithWorld:

Russian Orthodox take icy plunges to celebrate Epiphany

A man prepares to dip in icy waters during an Orthodox Epiphany celebration, with the air temperature at about -26 degrees Celsius ( -14.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in Pereslavl-Zalessky, some 140 km (87 miles) northeast of Moscow January 19, 2010/Sergei Karpukhin

A man gets out of the water during an Orthodox Epiphany celebration, with air temperature at about -24 degrees Celsius (-11.2 degrees Fahrenheit) in Suzdal, some 200 km (124 miles) northeast of Moscow January 19, 2010/Denis Sinyakov

A man helps a woman out of the Bazaikha river during Orthodox Epiphany celebrations, with air temperature at about -28 degrees Celsius (-18.4 degrees Fahrenheit), in the suburbs of the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk January 19, 2010/Ilya Naymushin

A man dips in icy waters during an Orthodox Epiphany celebration, with air temperature at about -24 degrees Celsius (-11.2 degrees Fahrenheit) in Rostov, some 200 km (124 miles) northeast of Moscow January 19, 2010/Sergei Karpukhin

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…?

Snow. Looks good on those Christmas cards, doesn’t it? Fun for small children. Even nice for penguins in the zoo. But photographers covering soccer? Brrrrrrrrrr. Not really.

Let’s get one thing straight. We Brits go on about the weather like a stuck record, but when it comes to it, we can’t cope with it. That’s why we live in Britain.

We whinge when the mercury drops to -3 (26 degrees Fahrenheit). A colleague of mine in Canada will point out that’s not cold. Cold, proper cold, can’t feel your fingers, just walked into a fridge cold, is -25 (-13 degrees Fahrenheit).

So when the Met Office started predicting heavy snowfalls on the night of the Aston Villa v Liverpool game, I did my best boy scout impression, packed my shovel and set off four hours early, you know, in case of snowdrifts the size of elephants.

Choking back the horror

Five years have passed and I still find it hard to talk about the tsunami. When the subject comes up my throat still constricts, choking back the horror and raw pain that I saw and more shockingly, the way the rest of the world seemed to carry-on with daily life. Relief came – sometimes too much of it, but nothing prepares a photographer for the shock of returning to normality from a disaster zone.

I was in Phuket the day before Christmas, dodging the bullet perhaps as my ground floor room would certainly have become my tomb. Back in Singapore the news broke and I flew to Sri Lanka, arriving at the center of the destruction 24 hours after the waves. My first stop was a hospital outside Galle. Hundreds of bodies lay on the damp concrete floor, children in fetal positions next to what rescuers assumed were their parents. Some of them had bandages and IV’s telling the story of the pathetic struggle to save them, others just looked like they were asleep, still in pajamas but slowly bloating.

Blood and bodily fluid and the stark stench of decomposition. I worked the scene like a vulture, the lenses my shield; my shock at the scene my helmet; technical adjustments on the cameras my distraction from the horror. I edited on the fly, transmitting a few images via satphone and moving onto more death. It is only that night as I look through my day’s take that the tears come, as the reality of what I saw hits me – there is no lens now. Only the hard truth in 2 megabyte files on a dusty laptop screen.