As the new Argentine president elect senator Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner arrives at the Casa Rosada for the first official engagement following her election, Marcos Brindicci uses depth of field to lightly blur the image of her husband and predecessor Nestor Kirchner, drawing the eye to the former First Lady and nicely flattening the background.

The image is suggestive of the way in which attention has passed from the outgoing president to his wife, the first woman to run the country. 

It is simple and nicely executed and worthy of its place in today’s Editor’s Choice.

When you cover as much soccer as we do in the UK and read countless stories in the papers about footballers only being in it for the money and ruining the “beautiful game”, which isn’t anyway the game it used to be….. it is refreshing when players do something which in some way redresses the balance.

Covering several soccer matches every week it can be easy to slip into a formula of action, goal and celebration pictures and while these images are our bread and butter, they are not the only ‘key moments’.

This weekend’s Liverpool v Arsenal clash at Anfield was a case in point.

The two teams played a thrilling game resulting in a 1-1 draw with both team’s star players, Steven Gerrard of Liverpool and Cesc Fabregas of Arsenal not only scoring the goals but also driving their their sides through the fixture.

Our photographer at the match, Darren Staples, will have been deeply frustrated that both goals were scored at the end furthest from him, but for me he nailed the key image from the match - the moment when the final whistle blew and Gerrard and Fabrigas shook hands and embraced in a gesture of sportsmanship and mutual respect.

Not technically challenging maybe, but these two frames encapsulate the spirit of the game perfectly. 

HOWZ-E-MADAD, Afghanistan, October 23 2007  – Canadian and Afghan National Army troops abandoned a dawn ambush of Taliban fighters at a mud village in southern Afghanistan and were walking across a dusty field when the first Taliban shell struck.

It exploded about five meters (yards) away from four Canadian soldiers mentoring and training their Afghan counterparts.

As a photographer embedded with the Canadians, I was hit by the blast and then enveloped by a cloud of dust and smoke as we scrambled for cover behind a mud wall shielding us from Taliban positions on the opposite side of a grape field.

Canadian and Afghan troops quickly returned fire and I focussed on taking pictures of an Afghan army soldier shooting a heavy mounted machine gun from a nearby ditch.

A second shell from an 82-millimeter recoilless rifle exploded immediately in front of him and he disappeared in the flash of light as sand blasted me and the shockwave knocked me over. I was sure he was dead, or at least wounded. A moment later, he bounded out of the ditch and ran towards me through the smoke, the heavy machine gun blazing from his hip, Rambo-style.

A third shell slammed into the solid mud wall where Canadian Sgt.-Maj. Paul Pilote was standing, punching a hole through it and sending the soldier sprawling backwards. Stunned, and with blood spilling from his nose and mouth, Pilote crawled away from the explosion on hands and knees. I kept shooting through the haze.

Under fire from Taliban insurgents, Canadian Master Corporal Frank Flibotte and Major Jean-Sebastien Fortin moved to assist Pilote.

IN THE LINE OF FIRE

I moved back from the wall taking shell hits and was reluctant to leave the cover of a ditch until I realised the Afghan troops had fled and the Canadians were busy with Pilote on the other side an open dirt road in the direct line of fire.

Not wanting to be left behind, I scrambled over the wall of a nearby compound and moved through a garden blooming with purple flowers. I was still cut off from the Canadians by the open road and needed to get pictures of them treating Pilote.

An armoured RG-31 vehicle raced to the scene and filled the open space in the firing line, so I ran behind it towards the wounded Pilote.

“Get back behind the RG!” shouted Maj. Fortin.

I wasn’t sure that was such a good idea since it was an obvious target for the next shell, compared to the relative safety of the ditch where Fortin and Flibotte were treating Pilote, but I ran back anyway, tripping and falling, like an old woman.

Pilote’s wounds were not serious and I photographed Flibotte and Fortin helping him to his feet and supporting him as they staggered towards the RG-31 while others provided covering fire. We retreated to a nearby base, where we heard the sound of heavy fighting as another company came under attack.

We had to go back out. It was the last thing I wanted to do. I just wanted to go to be somewhere safe. But the troops don’t have that option and neither did I. An Afghan soldier had been shot in the shoulder and had to be evacuated.

JUST ANOTHER “TICK”

The Canadians called in armoured support from its Quick Reaction Force, consisting of more than a dozen armoured vehicles, while tanks, U.S. Humvees and U.S. Rangers provided back-up. Artillery sent in smoke cover and U.S. Apache helicopters clattered overhead. Afghan army and police also reinforced.

Meanwhile, Fortin estimated there were between 10 to 15 Taliban fighters, most of them just wearing grubby robes and sandals. None were confirmed killed or wounded.

“It shows how all the military might in the world can’t stand up to ten ragtag fighters who believe God is on their side,” a fellow journalist said afterwards, summing up the challenge facing NATO forces as they try to crush a determined guerrilla movement.

The battle at Howz-e-Madad in the Zhari district of Kandahar province was typical of the conflict gripping Afghanistan’s southern region bordering Pakistan, where at least 23 such “contacts” occurred in the last month.

The photos were splashed across front pages in Canada the next day, but in the grand scheme of things, it was just another “tick,” as soldiers here call firefights.

People often ask whether it’s worth the risk taking combat pictures. It’s only worth it if you don’t get hurt or worse. The second something bad happens, the gamble is lost.

We were lucky. Pilote suffered only minor shrapnel wounds and some hearing loss and the Afghan wounded in the shoulder is recovering well.

Under fire, you just want to get the hell out and you swear you’ll never go out there again. But the soldiers have to do it. So it’s part of the job.

 Finbarr O’Reilly
 

Photo: Lucy Nicholson.

4.30am and traffic is actually moving at the busiest freeway junction in the U.S.  If only I could drive everywhere at this time.

Photographer Mike Blake has been up all night waiting to hear whether he will have to evacuate from his San Diego home with his wife and son.  Luckily the wind has changed direction and the expected firestorm didn’t make its way to the coast.

Californian homes burn fast.

Not like brick or stone houses.  A couple of hours after the first spark, all that remains is a pile of shredded paper.  The powdery landscape is broken up by satellite dishes, burnt-out car chassis, metal-framed garden furniture and the odd piece of pottery.  An acrid chemical smell lingers for days.

Survivors often use the word “rage” to describe the fire blown through their neighborhoods by 100+ mph winds.  It cruelly levels some people’s homes while leaving their neighbors’ untouched.

Photo: Lucy Nicholson

I arrive in San Diego and call our fire photography guru, Reuters freelancer Fred Greaves.  I’ve been listening to local AM radio for the last couple of hours and have called the San Diego fire service command center.  While there are countless home evacuations and miles of brush burning, there are also no recent reports of homes on fire.  I ask Fred’s advice on where to go.  “Follow the black smoke,” he says.

Greaves is close to the Mexican border, I am in the east, Mario in the west, and Mike is covering the evacuation centers.

I can’t see any black smoke through the thick grey smoke.  Just a beautiful deep red sun rising.

 Photo: Mike Blake.

Immediate mandatory evacuations have been ordered in a rural area out east, so I head that way.  I cross a police roadblock with my press pass and my car is the only one driving east as I pass miles of traffic queuing to evacuate in the other direction.  The wind pounds my car and I finally see black smoke on an Indian reservation in the distance.

Photo: Lucy Nicholson

I drive through an eerie deserted landscape of burnt-out cars and buildings.  A few people are running.  An empty casino is untouched.  I see a burning home in the distance, so I stop the car.  The wind is swirling, throwing sparks from the flames onto the trees in every direction.  I run through a field towards the intense heat, shoot 4 frames with my camera then run back to the car.  There are no firefighters in sight.

Photo: Lucy Nicholson

Further down the road a woman is watching her neighbor’s trailer home burn to the ground as her husband sprays their yard with a garden hose.

Photo: Lucy Nicholson

Next stop is an affluent area in the hills further west.  There is a fire truck in every other driveway.  I head toward a plume of black smoke where I find firefighters trying to put out a fire in a private vineyard while pushing the flames away from homes.

Meanwhile, Mario has come across a neighborhood just as the fire hits and makes great photos of firefighters battling to save homes.

Photo: Mario Anzuoni

When I first began to shoot fires in California, Fred Greaves took me to be outfitted in a firefighter suit and helmet with an emergency fire shelter, and told me to wear jeans and cotton clothes underneath and leather shoes.

The shelter is a reflective sheet which you are supposed to whip out and crouch underneath if fast-moving fire heads your way.  A photographer from USA Today told me he had to use his once and ended up in the burns unit.  He had to ask his wife to peel crispy skin from his back every night for weeks.  “That’s love,” he told me.

Lucy in firefighter outfit

All the stores are closed, so I sit outside a gas station in my yellow outfit to transmit photos.  My face is smudged with soot, and my hair is matted.  A woman rests her hand on my shoulder, tells me “God Bless,” and offers me a sandwich.  I tell her thanks, but I’m not a firefighter.  “You’re working hard out there though,” she says, but retracts my sandwich.  It looks so good.

Prisoners are used a lot for fighting wildfires in California.  They stand out in their orange suits.  The women work together and most of them chain-smoke as they do the physically exhausting job of clearing brush for a dollar an hour.  I once came across a group of male prisoners attacking bushes on a hillside with chainsaws as they tried to prevent a flare-up.

As the sun sets, I see some National Guard troops protecting an evacuated neighborhood from looters.  A soldier, who told me he was glad to be home from Iraq, was politely asking residents to park their cars and stand in line.

The area was heavily hit by the fire and there are hundreds of people lining up.  I ask a cop what is going on and he says they are escorting people to their homes to collect medication.  I asked him if they needed to show a prescription, but he is taking the humane approach.  He tells me that as long as people tell him they are going to get medicine, he will let everyone be escorted to see their home.

Most people do not mind being photographed - some are indifferent, some excited to be in print.

One woman who has lost her home starts screaming at a local newspaper photographer taking her picture with a long lens.  He apologizes again and again but she continues her tirade.  I apologize too, even though I wasn’t photographing her, and she walks away.  He seems upset, so I tell him he wasn’t doing anything wrong, that most people appreciate us being there to tell their story.  I also tell him he probably made her feel better, by allowing her to vent at someone, even though I’m not sure if this is true.

350 miles after the beginning of the day, I scrub the soot out of my ears, wash my hair, wrap it in a towel and fall asleep before I remember to take the towel off.

Photo: Lucy Nicholson

Mike and I are flying to Denver to shoot World Series baseball this weekend.  I’m not normally excited about high altitude (1 mile above sea level) and temperatures just above freezing, but it will be good to breathe again.

Photo: Fred Greaves

Photo: Mario Anzuoni

Photo: Mike Blake

The quote above is from an interview with Adam Baron, a You Witness contributor, whose powerful images form a part of citizen journalists’ documentation of the raging fires in Southern California and their aftermath. Reuters readers have provided pictures to You Witness News from when the fires began in Malibu to the ruins in Fallbrook. Here is a selection of the best images.

Baron, who works at Pepperdine University, Malibu, and is responsible for students who stay on campus, gives us an insight into what it was like living and working with the fires ravaging areas nearby.

Around the world there are certain places that awaken our imagination and serve as symbols of everything we associate with a particular region of our world. Southern California and particularly Malibu, California is that kind of place for many people. It is America’s paradise hub and the place where many of Western culture’s creative elite make their residence. Therefore when fires ran through “Shangri-La” this week and ran through greater Southern California, something of a sobering and sublime mood also laid claim on its people and pristine landscape.

The unbiased weather did not discriminate where the winds would blow or where burning embers would land. The result led to the spectacular reality and images of Mother Nature’s continuing reminder that wealth, power, beauty, and fame cannot protect us. Rather we have been humbled and are simply grateful to the brave men and women who fought these fires from land and air to preserve something of our way of life here. We now begin the task of counting our losses and rebuilding.

On the campus of Pepperdine University in Malibu, California students have returned to classes and the tasks of writing papers and preparing for exams. Here everyone is indebted to the university leadership and emergency contingency plans they prepared in advance for such an occasion. Many students chose to leave campus, but for those who heeded the council of administration to stay, they witnessed nature’s fury and humanity’s best instinct to preserve and protect.

There are many moving parts when something so daunting strikes at such a large area. No doubt there will be armchair editors ready to explain what and how things could have been handled better. In my view such questions miss the main point. If these questioned raised by the media or residence affected by the fires aim to get at improving response time and governmental engagement, those are fair questions.

However, we must also consider the human element and how ‘we the people’ use the land. I don’t mean to say that we caused the fires or get into a discussion about global warming. All I am saying is that paradise was here, along with the Santa Ana winds and the beautiful landscape, long before the people. We’ve learned how to split an atom and fly a man to the moon, but we haven’t learned how to manage the weather, and I am not sure we ever will or that we are supposed to.

I am confident that we must continue to explore our place on this small planet and our indebted relationship to it. It is a slippery task but the reason I taking photographs like these is to somehow grab hold of this relationship and honor it.

I had mixed feelings as the unmarked, white-painted, Royal Jordania airline flight from Amman approached Baghdad international airport. After a tight turn and in order to lose height quickly, a nosedive, it touched down on the runway. What could I expect this time, six months after my last embed with U.S. troops in the Iraqi capital?

The conflict in Iraq is a familiar everyday story in our mass media world. Here a suicide bombing with dozens of dead , there a car bomb that kills and maims dozens. The pictures of life in a war zone have become familiar and similar scenes are shown again and again. For viewers a world away from the conflict these images are nevertheless unreal, far from their everyday experiences - but this is daily life in Iraq, for every Iraqi.

During my last stay in Baghdad in March I was confronted with the reality of the inconceivable, cruelty of this war. Corpses, bound and tortured lying in the roads; the dismembered bodies of Iraqi soldiers; children, women and men trying to live their everyday lives constantly afraid of becoming victims of the next bomb attack.

US servicemen often ask me what I expected to find in Iraq? My answer is always, “I don’t expect anything. I just witness what I see”. And I can see everything I want to see.
After three weeks in the city I can see that a little progress has been made.

The embedded journalist program is the only way a western journalist can operate with a degree of safety. Even so you have to take care every step you walk for fear of triggering a roadside device or being ambushed.

You live with the military 24/7, sleep in the same tents and eat the same food. They talk freely, openly and often controversially about their circumstances. They are a friendly bunch, usually happy to meet a German photographer as many have been stationed in Germany and have good memories of their time there.

For a foreign journalist there is no other way to work in an environment that is all to often lethal for even seasoned locals. Of course my report is just a window on events there but hopefully adds to a balanced picture overall.

Even from an armoured Humvees, wearing heavy body armour and a kevelar helmet, the small “baby steps” are apparent. The “concerned citizen” program, where local groups cooperate with US troops and provide limited security in their neighbourhoods has seen life return to the streets - small shops are open again and butchers are back in business.

I spent some time with a Blackhawk helicopter MEDEVAC unit, called the “Witchdoctors”. These are the medics who rush to the scene of roadside explosions and the number of emergency calls has diminished markedly in the past few months.

Today, patrolling through Baghdad’s Haifa Street - one of the most embattled hotspots between insurgents and U.S. soldiers -  apart from the Iraqi army checkpoints, some sort of stable existence seemed to be returning and people were out and about doing their daily shopping, there even new street lights.

Of course this is still miles away from peace, but the small changes, the “baby steps”, I have witnessed give me some hope for the future in Baghdad and if not for this generation, then the next, their children.

Doorstepping. It comes with the territory. Any news photographer will tell you that.In fact if you can remember back to the last time the Conservative party were in power, doorstepping Members of Parliament was so common that it prompted one colleague to refer to himself as a professional milk bottle. There are doorsteps that require immense amounts of waiting time, where at any given second the subject could arrive or depart into a melting pot of strobes, elbows, quantum cables, screaming producers and the occasional passing mother and child with pram. And while all this is happening it’s also raining and the traffic warden is quickly putting a £100 ticket on your windscreen.
Then sometimes you are lucky enough to get the Nobel Prize for Literature doorstep. In fact twice in two years I have by chance landed the call “……..we’re just getting the address…..”    

Both Harold Pinter and Doris Lessing were either at home or within walking distance. Pinter was in fact in the middle of his lunch and suddenly appeared on his doorstep sporting a cap and a black eye from a recent fall. There were half a dozen journalists and photographers and the light was perfect. Similarly with Lessing, who arrived by taxi, only to be told by a Reuters journalist that she had in fact won the prestigious prize. She then sat on her doorstep and conducted interviews. At this time there were only a dozen members of the media and again the light was perfect.

Two authors on two doorsteps in two years winning the grandest prize in the literary world. Both sets of pictures were aided by virtue of the fact that the UK picture desk searched for and obtained both addresses in record time. It meant that as the photographer, I had an advantage when I arrived. Almost unheard of on a doorstep, where the usual scenario involves everyone poised at the start line, a door opens, and we all scramble for the finish line together.

When words fail us there are alway hand gestures to fall back on.

There’s no way anybody could misunderstand the two-fingered salute, everybody knows what that means don’t they?  Two fingers, hand facing outwards means victory - a gesture widely associated with Winston Churchill - who seems on occasion to have made it the wrong way round, palm inwards. 

Although perhaps that was because being British he meant something else altogether. In the UK this gesture, allegedly dating back to the time when captured bowmen had the first two fingers on their right hand hacked off to render them harmless, two fingers raised like this palm inwards, is a demonstration of defiance, offensive even.

So that’s what former Chelsea coach Jose Mourinho is telling us? No, he’s indicating he wants two players forward and two back. And Boris Yeltsin - two players forward or a gesture of defiance? No, he’s telling us he caught two fish.

But Quentin Tarentino is giving a V-for-victory sign, like Churchill right? Yes, Quentin’s is a friendly, celebratory gesture, unlike that demonstrated by fellow director David Slade, who unlike Tarentino is British, isn’t ordering two players forward and hasn’t caught any fish.

RUGBY WORLD CUP 2007.

I have been seven weeks in France and now everything could depend on one split second. That was certainly the case four years ago when Kieran Doherty took this picture of Jonny Wilkinson’s  winning drop goal for England in the last minute of the 2003 Rugby World Cup final against Australia in  Sydney.

Kieran’s insight into the game was crucial to the making of this picture. He knew that a drop goal from either side would win the match and as the seconds ticked away and England drove deeper into Australia’s half, the ball was passed to Jonny and the moment was captured perfectly.

This weekend’s final in Paris will be no different. In pursuit of that special moment, once again, all angles will be covered, whether it’s the winning try, penalty or a drop goal. Five photographers will be at ground level and two in elevated positions. One of them will need a head for heights as he will be in the roof structure almost directly over the pitch, an angle which can make interesting images like these by Philippe Wojazer.

 With  a tournament this long a lot of days are spent shooting pictures on the training ground.  The teams are very keen to practise their moves in secret so we are allowed only 20 minutes at the start of a session to get the pictures that will hopefully illustrate the story of the day. Doing the same warm up session has certainly tested the imagination of the Reuters photographers here, but they seem to come up with the goods.

Having followed England since September 2 and watched some distinctly average performances in the early  games, it’s  a pleasant surprise to see them make the final against South Africa.  It represents the culmination of years of hard graft, honing special skills and being driven by the will to win. I imagine it is pretty important for the players too.

Training pictures by Eddie Keogh, Bogdan Cristel and Eric Gaillard. Match action pictures by Eddie Keogh, Eric Gaillard and Eddie Keogh.

 Beautiful they may be but Tokyo photographer Issei Kato appears to have captured the ugly truth beneath the surface in this image from the Miss International Beauty 2007 contest.

As the second and third placed lovelies pucker up to kiss the winner for the benefit of the assembled media, Miss Runner-Up Left looks to be whispering anything but congratulations while Miss Runner-Up Right looks ready to spit in her ear.

 I guess Issei just caught them at a bad moment, right?