Tennessee Old-Time Fiddler’s Championship - audio slideshow

While in Nashville for the CONCACAF qualifying soccer tournament, I had two off days and figured what else are you going to do in Nashville but go to a fiddle contest?

Alain Bernard of France is seen from underwater as he enters the water to set a new world record of 47.60 seconds during the 100m freestyle in the men’s semi-finals at the European Swimming Championships in Eindhoven March 21, 2008 (Photograph by: Wolfgang Rattay).

It is of course not possible for a photographer to be in the pool during a swimming competition, but that doesn’t stop a determined photographer getting the picture!

I have worked on this problem over a number of years, and got it down to a fine art. It is necessary to pre-position an underwater housing containing a regular Canon EOS 1D Mark 2N with (usually) a 15mm fish-eye lens. When the swimmers hit the water or swim over my camera, I release the shutter via a waterproof cable. The data is transferred from the camera to another housing containing a Canon transmitter that transfers the images from the camera to my laptop.

Above: Setting up my equipment at Eindhoven

Within seconds of the end of the race I am in a position to transmit the photographs to our desk operation in Singapore. The desk then immediately moves them globally.

Above: Setting up my equipment at Eindhoven

The underwater pictures of Alain Bernard were out on the wire four minutes after the Frenchman set a new world record over the 100m freestyle. In my mind this is a world record too, because I appear to be the only photographer - using a remote controlled underwater camera like this - who has worked out how to achieve consistent results with this notoriously unreliable set-up. Therefore I don’t need to wait for a couple of hours for the competition to end before jumping into the pool to retrieve my CF card, as do the other photographers

In the competitive world of sport photography, just like the swimming competition, seconds count. An hour is a life-time.

Above: At the end of the day, washing off the chlorine in my bathtub.

If someone had asked me just a few days ago what the worst road I could imagine in the world would be like, I would have told them probably a mountain road with lots and lots of rocks and pot-holes. Well, little did I imagine that these elements would combine with two mountain passes of around 4000 metres, vertical drops off the sides of around 500 metres, snow, ice and to top it all off, local police telling you that you cannot get to where you want to go.
The area is Sichuan Province in south-western China. The town is Kangding, located around 400 kilometres west of the capital Chengdu. The road leads west, towards Tibet. I am trying to cover the story about the violence that has spread into the province following the rioting in the Tibetan capital Lhasa on March 14. In order to find out what is going on, myself and text journalist John Ruwitch needed to get to another town called Litang, some 400 kilometres west of Kangding, where there were reports of trouble last week.

John Ruwitch and I in front of the local bus we got taken off by police.

So we got on a local bus at 6.30am, ready for an 8 hour trip. Well, before we even leave the terminal, we were asked to get off by two local policemen. ‘Where are you going?’. Well, since the bus had the name of the town written on the windscreen directly behind where John and I were standing, we pointed to it. ‘Why are you going?’. John explained very simply in his excellent Chinese ‘Because we hear it is very beautiful’. That seemed to be a good answer, and we were allowed to get back on.
The bus started off some three minutes after the scheduled departure time of 7a.m. due to our little chat with the local constabulary, and no more than one kilometre down the road, the bus was stopped again. Another two policeman got on the bus, and again we were asked to get off. ‘Where are u going?’ was the question once more. Same answer. ‘Why are you going?’ Same answer again. And to our surprise after a 20 minute delay this time, which the locals on the bus were not at all pleased about, we got back on the bus and once more started our journey.
The road started off just fine. Winding up the first mountain pass (this one was only 3800 metres-high) the snow from the previous night gave everything the look of being wrapped in a beautiful white blanket. And when the sun rose, the gorgeous morning light added a warm glow to an already pristine scene.
We got 100 kilometres from Kangding. All good.
150 kilometres, all good.
At 200 kilometres, a local official was at a toilet stop. He looked at the bus, but did not get onboard. On we went.
250 kilometres, we continued west.

The water closet along the road, and trust me, you don’t want to go inside…

Then, at 300 kilometres, we got unstuck. A police roadblock. Two police get on the bus. Two foreigners get off the bus. Two foreigners stay permanently off the bus. ‘Litang is forbidden for foreigners’ the abrupt, yet nice young female policewoman tells us. We come to the conclusion that there is no chance we will get any further west.
We are put into a small, and I do mean small, mini-van and driven back to Kangding. And how bad I thought the road was on the way in was multiplied by 20 times going back. How this van managed to stay together is a miracle. I must have hit my head on the roof at least a dozen times. And this was going at an average speed of just 20 kilometres per hour. Never again I said, never again.
Three days later, I am in a taxi travelling along the same road, at the same speed, at the same time, but now with the added obstacle of ice covering the entire road. How this taxi managed to stay on the road, going up and down the mountain passes, with no chains on the wheels, is yet another miracle. I didn’t realise just how slippery the road was until I had to get out and push the cab, when we lost momentum and stopped after getting stuck behind a large truck up a hill, and then run and jump back into it.

A yak sits in the middle of the icy road after a heavy snowfall the night before.

This time, we did at least make it to our destination - a monastery in a small village some 200 kilometres away - but due to the large increase in the number of official vehicles along the road, I also now had to duck every time one of these cars approached. Try doing that over 50 times.
Anyway, now that I am back in Kangding, trying to cover this story, which is getting more and more difficult everyday, I try to sleep at night not dreaming about those bumps on the ‘world’s worst road’.

You’ve heard of the two-horse-town, well…

A local Tibetan walks towards his home situated at the base of a beautiful snow-covered mountain near Kangding.

In those first few seconds of waking in the morning, when my sleep has been disturbed, my first thoughts are to deny the cause of the sound.

“Maybe the door slammed; maybe a cat jumped over a bucket; maybe a vehicle tyre burst.” So many maybes… but the reality is usually the same. It is a bomb!

“Get up now,” I will say to myself, “If you are not there before the police then you are in trouble.” I always call another photographer, or the Reuters Television producer, to double check, and I hate to hear the reply, “It is a bomb, I heard it too.” But it is the response I have come to expect.

My camera equipment, which lives with me as a constant companion, will be over my shoulder as I call our driver, who lives nearby, and is usually already on the road. Now, all I have to worry about is getting to the scene as quickly as possible. We have to fight our way through heavy traffic, aggressive security forces and angry members of the public.

More than four million people live in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and the traffic is my worst frustration. The roads in Afghanistan are often narrow and rutted, with no traffic signals, crazy drivers and a total absence of rules.

Above: Military personnel secure a suicide blast site in Kabul

Above: The scene of a suicide car bomb explosion in Kabul

Above: A military helicopter flies over a blast site in the south of Kabul

On my way to a scene I always try to tip off my TV and text colleagues if I haven’t spoken to them already, and they do the same for me. If I am lucky I will reach the scene before the security forces, which are usually composed of Afghan policemen, Afghan soldiers, members of the Afghan intelligence service, NATO forces and U.S. troops. If I am not lucky it can feel like a big military party, at which the favourite music comprises wailing ambulance sirens and helicopter rotor blades churning the air. The accompanying lyrics go something like this, “No picture!!! Camera down!!! Get out of here!!!” followed by “Go away,” “Shove off,” and lots of swearing.

Above: Foreign military personnel (L) stop an Afghan police vehicle from advancing to a suicide blast site in Kabul

Above: Afghan police and security personnel search a suspect for explosives after a suicide bomb blast in Kabul

Amid this confused situation, we have little time to think of the plight of the victims - the dead and those wounded by the blast - we can only look for pictures that describe the carnage, and try to get away without being hurt ourselves. Scenes like this make me feel as if I am at a photo-shoot at a junk yard, with the wreckage of vehicles and the bits blown off them; the shattered bodies of the victims; the blood stains; the broken windows and a million other bits and pieces.

Above: A U.S. soldier walks away from a suicide blast site in Kabul

Above: Afghan policemen secure a car bomb site in Kabul

It is only when I have arrived back at the office and filed the pictures that I am back to myself, and continue with the routine of any normal person. I say to myself, “I should get some breakfast, I should brush my teeth…” and so much more.

Above: A British soldier (2nd L) tries to stop a mourning Afghan woman from approaching a suicide attack site in Kabul

Above: An employee of the Afghan Ministry of Justice looks out through a shattered window after an explosion in Kabul

Above: Afghan families and relatives of Tuesday’s suicide bombing victims carry the bodies to a cemetery for burial in the city of Baghlan, north of Kabul

Above: An Afghan army soldier keeps watch after a suicide bomb blast in Kabul

Above: A U.S. military personnel (R) and an interpreter stop locals from approaching the scene of a suicide blast in Kabul

All photographs by Ahmad Masood

When a dignitary leaves home for a foreign trip, Reuters and other major news organisations make an editorial and logistical decision on whether to send a staff photographer or rely on local cover.

As we don’t have a local Jamaican photographer, I was dispatched from Washington to join the seven London-based photographers working for various newspapers, agencies and freelance organisations covering the recent visit to the Caribbean by Britain’s Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.

Whether coming from London or elsewhere, our respective companies commit time, effort and money to get us into position for the royal tour. Having traveled all that way it usually boils down to a few precious seconds when the memorable images that define the whole assignment flash before your eyes and you have to be in place to capture them. Easier said than done when you have to decide what NOT to shoot!

The decision to cover one photo opportunity at the expense of another, simply because a tight schedule doesn’t allow time for transport between both, means that careful forethought, the ability to visualize how an event is going to play out, and a fair measure of luck is vital. A simple miscalculation can result in missing the best pictures and wreck your day.

Sometimes the obvious has to be covered, and some photographers traveled to the dockside to photograph the royal couple arriving in Jamaica. It was a guaranteed picture, and as the old saying goes, ‘one in the hand is worth two in the bush.’ But I took a gamble to miss the dockside picture because it promised to be dull, instead choosing what I hoped would be a colourful visit to the home of the late Jamaican musician Bob Marley. There was no guarantee of what we would be able to shoot, but I thought ‘What says “Prince Charles in Jamaica” more than being surrounded by Rastafarians playing the drums?’ and kept my fingers firmly crossed.

I took the chance, and was rewarded when Prince Charles and Camilla joined in on the drum-beating themselves. In addition I got a bonus during a light-hearted and rare moment of interaction between the royal couple and locals that pulled all the required visual elements together into one neat package. These are the sort of pictures that are never going to win any awards and I have no illusion that they have any artistic value, but they demonstrate that sometimes getting back to the wire-photographer basics of “F8 and be there” are sometimes all it takes to get into print, as the following photographs show…

However, even a routine walkabout can make interesting photographs, especially when there are children there, who always like to get in on the act. Composition and a helpful smile also helps, as the pictures below demonstrate.

The news business is unpredictable! It keeps you on your toes, forces you to develop a sharp logistical mind and a good nose for a picture. I took a risk and it paid off, but tomorrow… well, that’s another day.

Of course, getting the pictures out fast as possible is essential, with the aid of a laptop and an aircard that transmits data over the mobile phone network, for tight London deadlines. But that is another story and, maybe, the subject of another post.

The term ‘multimedia’ is used quite liberally these days, and means different things to different people. In reality it is an opportunity to be grasped, and will probably be what we choose to make it.

To mark the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq conflict Reuters has produced a multimedia piece. It pulls together the combined expertise of stills photographers, video camera operators , graphic artists, text journalists, and the multimedia producers. The various professionals are given freedom within their own discipline, and the different formats are brought together in a unified medium. The still image has not been devalued, but its role has been transformed. If this piece is an example of the multimedia project of the future, the still image is there too, as powerful as ever.

They say that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. This has been true of the photographic coverage of the Shuttle launches where, surrounded by the latest technology, the retrieval of images from remote cameras close to the launch site had been slowed down because photographers were forced to wait for hours after lift-off before retrieving the cameras.

However, attempting to improve its service by speeding up the delivery of important images, the Reuters team in the US has worked over a number of years with camera manufacturer Canon and wireless provider Sprint Mobile Broadband to offer a solution. Images from the four cameras using short telephoto lenses and set up within a few hundred yards of the launch pad were sent via wireless internet at super-fast data speeds using a uniquely designed transmitter from Canon. The images were received and passed on to editing desks from the cameras in near real time, as opposed to the hours taken in the past.

These two photographs show the set-up in place near the launch pad.

This set-up together with software developed by Reuters to receive, edit and transmit photographs has reduced the time it has taken from image retrieval from the launch pad cameras to transmission on the Reuters wire by 95 percent.

The system was used successfully for the past two launches of Atlantis and Endeavour on February 7 and March 11, 2008. Here are two photographs, taken using the system, of the March 11 launch.

Hats off to Luis Vasconcelos for this powerful picture.

The caption says, “An indigenous woman holds her child while trying to resist the advance of Amazonas state policemen who were expelling the woman and some 200 other members of the Landless Movement from a privately-owned tract of land on the outskirts of Manaus, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon March 11, 2008. The landless peasants tried in vain to resist the eviction with bows and arrows against police using tear gas and trained dogs. REUTERS/Luiz Vasconcelos-A Critica/AE (BRAZIL)”.

Images of heavy-handed oppression really don’t come much better than this - defenceless, screaming woman clutching naked child is shoved and beaten by faceless, armoured authority.

The symbols are reinforced by the strong composition. The woman and her child appear all the more vulnerable as the only elements of humanity and colour against the advancing wall of shields and boots.Such a potent image leaves very little room for any doubt. In such circumstances do we need to know the details of the dispute to have any doubts that what we are witnessing is wrong?

Tuesday March 10 was one of those days when the cat wouldn’t go outside. Had it been foolish enough to do so, it would probably have blown away or more likely, drowned. On England’s south coast huge waves battered the shoreline while in Western France the powerful storm ran a large freighter aground.

As commuters struggled with their umbrellas as they crossed London Bridge and winds reached 150Kph in France, Reuters Bucharest photographer Bogdan Cristel was climbing on the back of a 1000cc Honda Varadero to cover the first stage of the Paris-Nice cycling classic.

Bogdan has never covered a pro cycle race before and because he will be part of our team covering the month-long 2008 Tour de France cycle classic,

we had decided that this was a suitable event to get some training in with our professional motorcyclist Jacques Clawey. The idea was good - it just turned out to be the wrong day to do it.

In fact the wind was blowing so hard and the rain so heavy that the race organizers were obliged to shorten the 200kms stage to some 60kms, ferrying the cyclists by bus for much of it.

Bogdan and Jaqcues struggled on to the new departure point through blinding rain and hail and witnessed several accidents as other accompanying motorcyles fell foul of the wind and slippery roads.

Despite their heavy protective rain suits and cameras shut in saddle bags, by the time the race finally got underway, they were both completely drenched. The saddle bags had taken in several inches of water from the flooded roads and the Canon Mark IIN cameras were mis-firing, as were Bogdans’ strobes. As fast as he could wipe his lens with a piece of Chamoix leather the rain would bead it up again.

Despite the hardships, Bogdan managed to get a couple of usable race action pix in the few minutes that the rain eased off just before the arrival. As we had another photographer Jean-Paul Pelissier pre-positioned on the arrival line, with cameras sheltered under a very serious rain cape, we made the most of an otherwise horrendous day of sport.

Race over and installed in their hotel in Nevers, central France, Bogdan and Jacques spent several hours drying out their clothes, equipment and papers with the aid of a hair dryer.

To all the photographers who spend Monday, March 10 outdoors, including Pascal Rossignol, Toby Melville, Eddie Keogh, Luke MacGregor, Phil Noble, Stephane Mahe, Paul Armiger, Stephen Hird, Jean-Paul Pelissier and of course not forgetting Bogdan and our motorcyclist Jacques Clawey, I would like to extend a very big thanks indeed.

On thelast night of the five day lunar new year holiday in South Korea a news alert appeared, “Namdaemun is smoking………..”

‘Nam’ means south, ‘Dae’ means great or grand and ‘Mun’ means gate - Great South Gate.Officially called Sungnyemun it was built in 1398 and had withstood invasions, Japan’s colonial occupation and was one of the few remaing historic structures in the capital leftstanding after the 1950-53 Korean War. It was an iconic symbol of national pride, the ‘face’ of the country, an intrinsic part of our culuturalheritage which children learn about in nursery rhymes.

Most South Koreans imagined it was just a small fire, maybecaused by an electrical short circuit. We thought that since firefighters were in attendancethe “small” fire would be quickly extinguished;it was not to be.

The firefightershesitated. Theycouldn’tdecide whethertomake a hole inthe roof to bringthe fire undercontrol or take other less drastic steps topreserve t our Number OneNational Treasure.Seoul-based duty photographer Jo Yong-hak was quickly on the scene.

By early Monday morning the massive stone and wood structure of Namdaemun was reduced to a charred hulkby the flames andthe sheer volume of water used to fight the blaze.

For South Koreans Namdaemun has always been a focal point. National campaigns are launched there, soldiers march past it onArmed Forces Day and demonstrators sometimes gather in front of it.

In order to shield Koreans from the terrible sight the authoritiesdecided to screen the ruins with a fence. Policemen stopped photographers from taking pictures as crowds gathered to mourn the destruction of their beloved icon.

The fire was set by 69-year-oldChae Jong-jiwho said he acted on impulse but maintained that it was an act ofrevenge against the government which he claimed hadtreated him unfairly. Police have said he was angry over compensation for a development project that claimed his property.

He said that he issorry to have destroyed somethingdear to so many people, but defiantly added: “Nobody got hurt. You can always restore cultural heritage.”

Yes, nobody was injured and wecan rebuild it, butSouth Koreansfeel a real sense of loss. Somehow this act of arsonnot only levelled 600 years of cultural heritage but it alsodealt a terrible blow tothespirit of our people.

Now whenever I have to go near the ruins I feelsadness formy 5-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter. I should have made the time to take them to visit Namdaemunbefore it vanished…

Pictures by: Jo Yong-Hak, Cultural Heritage Admnistration,Lee Jae-Won, Kim Kyung-Hoon andKwak Sung-ho