There have already been thousands of campaign pictures from the U.S. and before the process is over there will many thousands more which will inevitably provide rich pickings for blogs like this. From the Democrat nomination contest in Iowa come these three interesting examples.

Jim Young stills the frantic activity of the campaign trail in this image of Senator Barack Obama apparently meditating inside a bubble.

It is hard to escape the conclusion from John Gress’s picture that for kids at least, campaigning is not all fun and frolics as  former Senator John Edwards waits backstage with his children at Cronks Cafe.

Andy Clark brings us Hillary Clinton caught apparently playing the crowd like a piano.

More to follow in the New Year, in the meantime may I wish you a happy, healthy and peaceful 2008.

Bird’s eye views are comparatively rare in the daily news file.

Though not the high impact, immediately understood news and sports pictures we usually aim for, they can deliver a huge amount of information and fascinating detail, which unfortunately is not best illustrated in a low resolution format like this blog.

It is a strange coincidence that two should appear on the same day, albeit of vastly differing subjects. 

Zahid Hussein illustrates the biggest international news story of the day with this picture of family and supporters placing the body of murdered opposition leader Benazir Bhutto into a grave during her funeral in Pakistan.

Despite appearing to illustrate some sort of stand-off between this tightly packed crowd and yellow-jacketed officials, Luke MacGregor’s picture shows nothing more disturbing than bargain hunters waiting for the doors to open on Harrod’s winter sale in London.

The great thing about working for an international news agency like Reuters is that it is just that, international. The ability to look at lots of regional or local stories at the same time allows for a truly global perspective on world events. Never has this been more readily demonstrated than over the past week or so as Santa Claus and his helpers have geared-up their efforts for the festive season. Reports and pictures have come in thick and fast, a few of which I offer for your perusal.

I particularly like this picture of his merry helper elves warming up by dancing on a frozen lake in China.

From the hundreds of sightings which have flooded into the desk we can see that the old boy still adheres to traditional modes of transport,

- Kacper Pempel

although there is clear evidence that even Santa Claus is not immune to the mid-life motorbike crisis.

- Arnd Wiegmann

He is clearly a caring and compassionate individual,

- Guillermo Granja

but it is equally clear that he knows how to have fun 

 - Hugh Gentry

Of course not everyone who looks like Santa is the real deal and the same

- Johanes Eisele

goes for angels, indeed some of them may not even have been good all year!

- Hannibal Hanschke

Compliments of the season to everyone, I hope Santa brings you everything you deserve.

I have left my letter to the photographers’ and picture editors’ Santa Claus rather late this year and am having real problems thinking of enough things to make it worth his while climbing down my chimney, here’s what I’ve got so far…

Dear Santa,

I hope this finds you free of the seasonal ailments afflicting the rest of us and that this note has not arrived too late for your consideration. I can only imagine how busy you must be at this time of year but then you have a lot of little helpers what with the Elves and all. It must be tough come annual performance appraisal time or do you just use casual, seasonal  labour?

This year I have been a good boy most of the time, which may if I’m entirely honest, have more to do with lack of opportunity than virtuousness but I would like to request the following modest items for my stocking please:

- The ability to fly and hover at will.

- A tap on my desk that delivers hot, strong tea.

- A laptop that works perfectly well when wet.

- Photographers that work prefectly well when wet.

- Digital cameras that do exactly what they are supposed to do when you get them - and when wet.

- Light, long-life, universal equipment batteries.

- A 3G network in the UK with as much bandwidth as those in the USA and Germany.

- An end to “pools”.

- Daylight at ground level in Downing Street at least once a year…

At which point I run out of inspiration, so I’d be very grateful for any other useful suggestions while there is still time please.

I hope Yusuf Ahmed Tawil will forgive me for taking liberties with his work, but it serves as a graphic illustration of just how fundamentally a little judicious cropping of an image can completely misrepresent the event it purports to illustrate. 

Trimming a little off the side of this image transforms our understanding of what is happening in this image of a demonstration by Papuans wearing traditional dress at the U.N. climate conference in Bali. The reality is somewhat less intriguing.

In this high impact news picture from Chor Sokunthea in Phnom Penh even without knowing the details it is pretty easy to understand what is happening. There can be little doubt about who is the aggressor and who is the victim here, can there? The clenched fist, the look on the monk’s face, the policeman recoiling as he attempts to defend himself from the impending blow tell us all we need to know - or so it would seem.

But not if you look at the original frame below. It tells an appreciably different story. That there is a brawl is indisputable but who exactly  is aggressor and who the victim is far less obvious. The policeman is shoving away a monk with his riot shield while swiping at him with his baton completely oblivious to the incoming fist.  Then there is the photographer - to some eyes he may just make things “untidy” but he was there and his presence adds useful context. He begs the question, “how out of control could this incident have been if it was safe enough to shoot pictures up close?”

These recrops are purely illustrative and neither moved on the wire. However in my view the more dynamic version of the fight picture is a perfectly legitimate image but only if seen in the context of the wider version or other similar establishing images.

In this competitive business if we can’t do ’exclusive’ or ‘definitive’, we go for ’better’ and/or ‘faster’ than anyone else’s.

Joshua Roberts

An incidental by-product of this is an unvoiced convention that where possible competing colleagues exclude one another from their pictures in part to keep images as ‘clean’ as possible but also in order to convey an impression of unrivalled or exclusive access to the event in question. It is largely unwitting and more presentational than an attempt to mislead or misrepresent and when one considers that most days there will be around 40 photographers on the touchline at a Chelsea soccer match and very many more at big set piece events on the White House lawn, it is usually something of a forlorn hope.

Yves Herman

In spite of this, most of us have at some stage ended-up in the backround of a competitor’s front page picture. If we are lucky we appear to be the model of professionalism, working with camera raised, but many a hapless individual has been caught, camera down staring into space. These are the pictures that pinned to the office notice board, we unwittingly walk past for days on end to the delight of our workmates, until the penny finally drops.  

The embed process is not a perfect beast. You can end up stuck for days waiting for a patrol, get placed with an unfriendly unit or spend a month without seeing much in the way of war. On the other hand  sometimes it’s a photographers dream; lots of action, compelling images and a mountain of praise from your peers. It’s a crap shoot and the only thing you can count on is that you can’t count on anything.

My embed up to now has pretty much been a train wreck. 

It started out on Dec 2 with a two-day wait for a helicopter ride up to Baquba, 50 kms north of Baghdad. I went out on one patrol, then joined AP photographer Marko Drobnjakovic and moved east to another base near Muqdadiya. As soon as we arrived we went up to the roof to check our sat phones. His worked great, mine didn’t. I’d tested the phone twice before, so this was a very unwelcome surprise and if there is one piece of equipment you really need in Iraq, it’s a good sat phone. The army had internet, but they politely declined to let me use it and the base internet cafe would not let you send attachments. So there we are, 100 kms northeast of Baghdad on a little military post, ready to get to work, but with no means to transmit. Aside from no phone, it wasn’t long before I had other problems. A big operation was planned for the day after we arrived and the press officer gave me to one unit and Marko to another.  Marko’s unit kicked in doors and took prisoners, mine sat in their armored vehicle for 8 hours in what is known as a ‘blocking’ position. Like a speed bump with guns. To top it off, the lead vehicle in our convoy got hit by a roadside bomb (no casualties) and I could not get out to shoot a photo. It happened 500 meters away but it might as well have been 500 miles.

So after 8 days on embed I had been out on two patrols and one useless operation, transmitted 18 photos and was developing an ulcer.

On Dec 10 I decided to return to the larger base in Baquba and try to sort out the phone problems. 

Dec 11 the press office set me up on a patrol but the platoon leader changed his mind at the last minute and decided no media. 

Dec 12 my press contact overslept and we missed a patrol, so I took pictures of Iraqi laborers loading rice onto a truck in back of the mess hall. 

Dec 13 I rode around in the back of an armored troop carrier while the Sergeant Major hopped from base to base checking on the morale of his troops.  The soldiers were in good spirits, I was not.

Finally on Dec 14 I got off the base and did some work. 

Dec 15 was an air assault on the Iron Triangle north of Baquba and as fate would have it I ended up with another fringe unit.  We walked through palm groves kicking dirt clods while .50 caliber machine guns and helicopter gunships fired in the distance.  By this time I was convinced the press office was deliberately sabotaging my embed and had a long heart to heart with the head PAO, asking what the hell was going on.  He said my problems boiled down to two words….’bad luck’.  

Which brings us to today.  I’ve returned to Baghdad to replace the sat phone and try to jump start the embed and at 8 pm I have a flight up to Baiji where I will hook up with the 101st Airborne Division.  I’m hoping that the next two weeks will be everything the past two haven’t been.
 

I really had intended to give the soccer pictures a rest but this one from Miguel Vidal in Portugal was too good to resist and it isn’t the usual ”jubo” or action picture. 

In fact to understand and enjoy it as a picture you do not need to know that it is a moment from a  soccer match or even the specific detail of the incident, (Porto’s Raul Meireles (R) argues with referee Olegario Benquerenza during their Portuguese Premier League soccer match against Guimaraes at Dragon stadium in Porto December 15, 2007).  

The image is so simple and eloquent that the caption information is almost a distraction.   

After a week of concentrated screen staring I escaped from Pictures of the Year 2007 to a nearby food court for dinner with my wife Andrea. We go there often as it is very close to our apartment and offers all kinds of tasty food. Normally we arrive around 2000 because by then everything has slowed down a bit and it is much easier to get a table at our favourite places.

This time as we sat outside drinking a beer, two couples arrived with babies and took the table next to us. They ordered food, fed their babies and chatted until their food arrived, then one mother opened up her laptop. I thought it rather strange that she’d should want to check her e-mails while she was eating until she moved the two highchairs together and stuck the laptop in front of the kids who can’t have been much more than a year old. 

I was so happy to have escaped my screen for the time being, I couldn’t help but feel slightly sorry for these poor little guys stuck in front of theirs, although the distraction it provided certainly gave their parents time to eat in peace and who knows, maybe maybe next time we see them they’ll be casually slipping “neigh, oink, baa, ruff, cluck, meow” into the after dinner conversation. 

After our trip to Australia I worked for just two weeks before escaping again, this time to Vietnam. We began our journey in the south at Ho Chi Minh city (Saigon) on the Mekong Delta, and travelled by minibus and plane via Nah Trang, flooded Da Nang, Hoi An and Hue (with its Forbidden City) to the northern Ha Long Bay and the capital Hanoi. Although it involved a lot of travelling and sightseeing, we had a good, relaxed time, always with an eye on the outstanding culinary delights, but that is a story for another day. 

I returned to the office completely relaxed and looking forward to my favourite job of the year, compiling the global selection of Pictures of the Year. Selecting the best pictures of the top stories of the year is a massive task and involves trawling through thousands of world class images including stunning news pictures, graphic scenes of conflict, natural disasters, sports, cute animal features and a lot of very, very boring pictures of men in suits, all too often shaking hands. There were artistic and colourful features, eye-catching stand alones and stunning sports action pictures. A huge challenge but a great job and one I still find thrilling even if I do have to look at more than 500 pictures every working day, five days a week.

At my request local and regional chief photographers had compiled their 2007 selections and while I was in Vietnam hundreds and hundreds of these images had flooded into the Singapore desk. Some were suggestions for the global “best of the best”, others targeted more locally. In the end there were more than 2,000 of them, about five times more pictures than than we needed. I whittled them down to a “short list” of about 1,000, then my boss Pedja Kujunzic and I went through the whole lot, time after time after time, discussing the merits of each picture and the relative importance of the story until we had our final cut. The hardest part was getting the blend right; ensuring that we had the best pictures of the big stories, spiced up with eye catchers to give clients everyhere a selection that was high impact and well balanced.  

In the end we moved clients some 400 Global Pictures of the Year 2007 - I’m sure you will see many of them in the round-ups of the year’s events in your papers or on the internet.

I would like to show you them all but here are a few, my personal selection.

Japanese video journalist Kenji Nagai lies dying in the street, still trying to record the scenes of violence after he was shot through the chest when soldiers fired live rounds at protestors in Yangon - Adrees Latif. (please see also http://blogs.reuters.com/photo/2007/09/2 8/shooting-to-kill/)

- Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, just visible beyond the riot shields of guards, as she pays her respects to the crowd of monks gathered outside the villa where she is under house arrest - stringer. (please also see http://blogs.reuters.com/photo/2007/09/2 5/come-in-rangoon/)

Ow! That looks painful…

- Austrian Gunther Weidlinger comes a cropper during the heats of the men’s 3,000 metres steeplechase at the 11th IAAF World Athletics Championship in Osaka - David Gray

- Christina Kim of the U.S. reacts after missing a birdie putt during a golf tournament in Florida - Hans Deryk. To me this is more of a nice feature than a sports picture, it delights my eye.  

- Glaucelio Abreu (L) of Brazil fights against Clarence Joseph of the Virgin Islands during their bout for the men’s 75 kg boxing competition at the Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro - Daniel Munoz. Maybe Daniel didn’t realize during the fight but this is a great stand alone image - it doesn’t matter who won.

- A crocodile at a zoo in the southern Taiwan city of Kaohsiung holds the forearm of a zoo veterinarian in between its teeth after biting it off - Frank Lin. What is there to say?  

- Yang Yang, 3, kisses a Beluga Whale during a publicity photocall at the Qingdao Polar Ocean World, in eastern China’s Shandong province - China Daily.

To prove that political pictures aren’t all men in suits shaking hands here are two examples of Condy Rice.  

- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice testifies before the U.S. House Appropriations Committee on the State Department’s international affairs budget on Capitol Hill in Washington - Larry Downing.

 - Desiree Fairooz of Texas, 50, jumps up in front of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice before Rice testifies before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington October 24, 2007. Fairooz, an anti-war protester waved blood-colored hands in Rice’s face at a congressional hearing on Wednesday and shouted “war criminal!”, but was pushed away and detained by police - Larry Downing.

- Majid Kavousifar and Hossein Kavousifar, his nephew, hang from the cable of a crane in Tehran. Iran hanged Majid and Hossein, the killers of a judge who had jailed several reformist dissidents, before a crowd of hundreds of people - Morteza Nikoubazl.

- An unexploded grenade lies next to the body of a suspected militant during a shootout in Srinagar. Police on Thursday shot dead two Islamic militants holed up in a hotel in the heart of Kashmir’s main city after a 20-hour gunbattle - Danish Ishmail.

- Revellers perform during a parade at the Carnival de Barranquilla in Barranquilla, Colombia - Fredy Builes.

- A Swiss flag is thrown into the air as more then 100 Alphorn blowers perform during the International Alphorn contest on the alp Tracouet in Nendaz, southern Switzerland - Stefan Wermuth.

- A protestor dressed as a clown stands beside a police officer at the Camp for Climate Action near to Heathrow Airport in west London - Stephen Hird. 

Last but not least a combination picture from Poland, showing two planes from the Zelazny aerobatics team, crashing at the Radom Air Show - Kacper Pempel. A series of images which are just as horrifying now as the first time I saw them. (please also see: http://blogs.reuters.com/photo/200 7/09/03/no-second-chance/)

If you enjoyed these you can find an extended selection here: Pictures of the Year 2007.