David Gray recounts his experience covering the earthquake that devastated Sichuan province, China.

1. Departure

May 12, 2:28 pm, almost all my Reuters Beijing colleagues saw the office TV sets shaking. Those TV sets had often shown the news but it was the first time they themselves had been the news. Within a few seconds, we realized it was an earthquake. An 8.0 magnitude earthquake had hit Sichuan province. Sichuan! My home. About ten minutes later, I was driving my car to Beijing airport. At that moment, I did not even know that there was a place on this earth called Wenchuan. Where was I going? What time could I leave? Fortunately, I was the first Reuters journalist to arrive at the airport and unfortunately I was the last to leave as I chose to fly to Chengdu and its airport was closed. I had almost no idea how serious the situation there was but wisely as it turned out took two instant DC/AC power inverters which meant I could work normally in the firs few days when the whole area was completely out of power.

2. In the field

On afternoon of May 13, after 6 hours of driving from Chongqing, the first earthquake-hit area I reached was Hanwang Town of Mianzhu. I was one of the first to arrive there. It later transpired that because the epicenter had been Wenchuan everyone assumed it would be worst hit when in fact towns in the surrounding area suffered more disastrously. It was like the end of the world with gloomy skies and soft drizzle. Terrified survivors told me Hanwang Dongqi Middle school had been horribly damaged so I headed there. It was unnaturally silent, the bodies of at least 20 students covered with plastic bags lay in a row on the ground. A mother gently removed the coverings trying to find her own child. Policemen surrounded the scene and I dared not approach but with a long lens I could see rain and tears merged on her face. Sometime later a couple found the body of their child and were just overcome with grief.  I shot a single frame and went and hugged them but then an aftershock struck which made the damaged buildings ‘peng peng’, like the King of Terrors clamouring against which humans were just so small and weak. The rain became heavier, the mourning became louder and the sky became darker. There was a choking smell of death. I could not believe that just that morning I had been in Beijing, a city with a population of 15 million.

3. Beichuan

On May 15 I set off for Beichuan, utilising all available modes of transportation - jeeps, cars and my own legs. I arrived 5 hours later as a mass military rescue team also reached the spot. It was a valley of death. A  landslide had almost buried the whole of the old district while the new part was just rubble with fires flickering here and there. Once in a while there would be a shout ”someone here” as a survivor was located beneath the debris. At one collapsed kindergarten, I saw dozens of cute little faces almost untouched except for the dried blood rimming their eyes and mouths while the rest of their bodies were stuck beneath heavy rocks and concrete. The tears in my eyes made it almost impossible to shoot pictures and I had constantly to remind myself that I needed to show this tragedy to the world in a way that was not too general but not too brutal. What a painful feeling, I saw everything I could not let my camera see as I walked and walked among the bodies of victims looking for pictures… I saw a butterfly fluttering between pretty shoes on the feet of a young girl which stuck from the rubble. As I pressed the shutter I mourned for this young soul and moved away to leave her be.  The next day, I saw a mother searching in the rubble for her daughter; she sobbed as she told me she had forced her 4-year-old daughter to go to school that day although she said she felt unwell. She kept saying, “I killed my own daugher”, and begged me not to shoot pictures of her…

4. Death is right at your back

With the death toll in Beichuan soaring, I felt obliged to continue my reporting there in case quake lakes burst or epidemics started. On May 17 for the first time in my life I felt the approach of death as I and 10,000 people ran for our lives. Around 2:55pm, a helicopter, hovering overhead reported that a nearby dam was about to burst and all military and rescue teams were ordered to retreat. All of a sudden everyone was running for their lives in complete terror - including me.

The day before I had imparted the details of my savings and investments to my editor in Beijing - just in case. In the circumstances I hadn’t wanted to worry my parents and which of us doesn’t want our parents to think we can take care of ourselves? But after hundreds of aftershocks, cracking dams, continuous landslides, with the threat of plague and a possible nuclear leak, I had felt it was maybe time to  hedge my bets a bit.

The stampede started downtown and ended on top of a nearby mountain 3 kilometers away. After running madly for 5-minutes, I realised what I was doing and turned back to record the scene with my cameras and called it in to the Reuters Beijing office. 

5. Back to Beijing

In 12 days I lost 5kg in weight and brought back sadness and nightmares to Beijing.

On May 24, as I boarded the flight back to Beijing from Chengdu, I met a senior photographer from a competiting agency, who said, “your pictures are very nice”. In Beijing we almost never talked and it was the first time that he had praised me face to face. While it is good to get compliments deep inside I still feel sad. I am Chinese born in Sichuan; after spending days in the ruins, keeping a lid on my emotions, shooting pictures, describing the scenes for my text colleagues in Beijing, helping to rescue survivors and fleeing for my own life, my sense of identity, my feelings and my reactions are complicated…

One thing I do know is that we are lucky - because we are still alive.

The first chapter coverage of this story is gone, things need to move on and I will try my best to play my part in it all.

Reuters photographer Siphiwe Sibeko talks about his experiences capturing dramatic images of the outbreak of violence in South Africa.

David Gray presents an audio slideshow on China’s southwest region.

These two headshots by Kai Pfaffenbach and Eddie Keogh from last night’s Champions’ League soccer final in Moscow between Manchester United and Chelsea show the joy of victory and anguish of defeat;

a defeat all the more bitter for John Terry the Chelsea Captain, right, who during the penalty shoot-out, slipped on the sodden pitch and miskicked the chance to seal victory for his team.  

For the victors, Manchester United, the rain became nothing more than a refreshing shower and Pfaffenbach shows team manager Sir Alex Ferguson’s exuberance completely undampened by the deluge. 

By contrast in Eddie Keogh’s picture of Chelsea manager Avram Grant, the rain seems to match the mood as he walks alone, defeated through the downpour.

The 133rd running of the Preakness Stakes horse race was held in Baltimore this past weekend. It is one of the most prestigious events in the American horse racing calendar, the second race in the annual three race series beginning with the Kentucky Derby and ending with the Belmont Stakes in New York. Once again the Reuters pictures team (Jim Young, Molly Riley, Jonathan Ernst, Tim Shaffer and I ), were armed with spools of electrical wire, switches and cases of extra cameras and lenses as we arrived from Washington 10 hours ahead of the 6pm race to set up our ‘remotes’.

Remote cameras are triggered either by a cable or wireless transmitter, allowing a photographer to shoot multiple angles of an important moment like the finish of a horse race. They can provide an usually high or low angle to vary the type of pictures we like to provide to our clients.  On news assignments remotes can also yield an alternative angle from a tight position or one that does not allow a camera to be hand held. The only limit to shooting remotes is the photographer’s imagination!!

With a cut-off time of 10am before the first race of the day, we set up five remote cameras under the inside rail of the track, and another on an observation post beyond the finish line with a high angle general view of the end of the race. Putting in place the gear - five EOS-1D Mark II cameras, an assortment of lenses from 16mm to 200mm, and their little mounting plates was a breeze, about 5 minutes in total, compared to the next step - getting them all to work!

Over the next hour, there ensued an awkward dance which involved laying our two-wire electrical cable in the mud alongside the inside rail of the track, clipping each remote camera’s slave cables into that string, and connecting a foot-switch that would fire all the cameras at the same time. All easier said than done when up to a dozen other photographers are doing exactly the same thing at the same time. Sports Illustrated alone laid out 12 cameras for the finish line picture.

The next most crucial step, involves “Dark Arts”, invoking the sort of magic that only boy wizard Harry Potter knows and attempting to appease the Gods of Technology and Good Fortune as, with all of your fingers crossed, you switch on the cameras to complete the electrical circuit and pray that none of them start firing indescriminantly at 8 frames per second, a sure sign that at least one of the connectors is set to the wrong electrical polarity.

Alas, in the distance we heard one of our cameras start firing off dozens of frames. We disconnected it from the string, reveresed the connector only to find that another of camera had started blazing away. There really is no science to setting up a string of random, separately functioning electrical devices like digital cameras, and with a lot of trial and error, we finally got all the cameras to behave themselves.

The fifth remote, high on an observation tower, was too far from the string of wired remotes so we utilized a set of Pocket Wizard wireless triggers which use a specific radio frequency determined by the user. That allows several photographers to fire just their own cameras, independent of other frequencies. The transmitter, a small box the size of a pack of cigarettes with an antenna atop, can be triggered with a button or placed into the hotshoe of a handheld camera and will fire whenever you press your handheld cameras’ shutter, like I did in this race.

In the eight hours and 11 races before the Preakness Stakes is run, we cover all the cameras with plastic bags and elastic bands to protect them from the water truck which comes by at the end of each race, spraying a ton of water on the track to keep it moist. Without the bags that water would destroy thousands of dollars worth of camera gear. We also do a test run, firing all the cameras during one of the early races, take the memory cards out and take a look the images on a computer screen then, based on the results, go back to each camera and fine-tune each camera’s focus, the exposure (with a 1/2000th sec shutter speed to freeze the motion of the horses), and adjust the composition if needed. Of course, whether the winning horse finishes up against the rail or 30 feet outside of the rail is beyond our control so we hedge our bets and assume the favorite, Kentucky Derby winner Big Brown will not only win, but do so along the rail.

In the end it was a successful day for the Reuters team. The pictures were fine and newsworthy; Big Brown did win the Preakness Stakes, not alongside the rail but not too far out, and Big Brown and his jockey Kent Desormeaux  go to the Belmont Stakes with high expectations of winning all three races, the elusive Triple Crown.

Before Big Brown had made his way to the winners circle, I had pulled the memory cards out of all the remotes and was feeding the key finish line sequences (only about 5-10 images per camera) into our other “remote” setup, the Reuters Paneikon editing software which allows a Reuters editor anywhere in the world to remotely edit pictures almost in real time. Canadian Chief Photograph Peter Jones, sitting at his desk in Toronto, took in our images within seconds of the race finishing and had all the important remote pictures on the wire and onto the front pages of Yahoo news and MSNBC.com within minutes. The front of the New York Times Sunday Sports section used our picture of Jockey Kent Desormeaux looking back at the other horses across the finish line, a key and telling image that told the story of how far ahead he beat the field, made with our third remote camera about 100 feet past the finish line.

Thinking about how many aspects can determine the success or failure of remotes, based on previous experience and other photographers’ anecdotes, here is a random list of things that can go wrong. Looking through it, I marvel at how high our success rate with remotes has been…

Any ONE of these things can ruin hours of set up time. The more cameras you add into the mix, the more chances that any of the following will happen:

* The water truck drowning the cameras and/or short-circuiting our wired connectors.
* Ditto rain, destroying thousands of dollars worth of equipment.
* An errant camera firing indiscriminantly and without warning, setting off all the other cameras in your chain.
* Getting the right exposure until the sun goes behind a big cloud = everything underexposed.
* At the criticial moment forgetting to step on the footswitch, or stepping on it too early and then every camera’s memory buffer fills up and temporarily stops shooting at the exact moment you need them all to be shooting.
* Another photographer moving your camera because it’s in the way of his own.
* Another photographer thinking that your precisely-setup camera is his own, deciding that all your settings are wrong, and changing them.
* Camera batteries dying halfway through the race.

* The winning horse finishes about 50 feet outside of the rail and becomes a small dot on all your remote cameras.
* Pre-focusing in the wrong place. Out of focus = unusable.
* Lens flare from the sun screwing with your exposure.
* Someone accidently cuts your trigger cable with a shovel as they ”helpfully” try to bury them out of the way in the mud.
* Forgetting to turn the cameras on after eight hours of waiting, or forgetting to put memory cards in the cameras, or not formatting (erasing) the card so that the card is already full from all the test pictures and therefore has no room for the “money shots”.
* Another photographer using your wireless transmitter frequency and filling your cameras cards with images of nothing but test frames before the race starts.
* Police calling in over the radio for extra donuts in the infield and using radio frequencies that interfere with your signal getting to your camera and firing it.
* Batteries on the transmitter dying before the race
* Someone stepping on your footswitch and filling all the cards on all your remotes with images of nothing before the race starts.

I could go on and on but you get the picture. Fortunately the Gods were smiling on us…
 

From Reuters photographer Goran Tomasevic who is near Garmser in Helmand Province, Afghanistan with the U.S. 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit come these 4 frames from a sequence taken when the unit came under fire from Taliban fighters May 18, 2008.

The Marine was uninjured.

http://www.reuters.com/news/pictures/slideshow?collectionId=1864&galleryName=All%20Collections#a=1

I covered the aftermath of an earthquake years ago as a new-comer to the business. I was living in Rome and we had felt the quake as it struck a moutainous region of Southern Italy just before 8 o’clock on a Sunday evening in November.

It was first light by the time we got to the village of Balvano. As, I drove down into the valley, the village was blanketed by cloud. There was no sound, there were no lights but as we passed through the cloud, we became aware of an awful noise - the terrible wailing of the survivors.

Did my pictures convey the horror of it all like the ones we are seeing from China? Did they eloquently tell the story of the men, women and children of the village crushed when the roof of the Third Century Roman church fell in on them? No, I blew it. I was so completely overwhelmed by the scale of the suffering, by the death, destruction and misery that I blew it. Never having experienced anything remotely like it, I felt a complete interloper ashamed to be pointing a camera at people who had lost everything.  

When I finally got to sleep my nightmares were full of people but my pictures were not. They showed wreckage and desolation but failed to give it a face. In the misguided belief that I needed somehow protect what shreds of dignity the victims had left by not exposing them to wider scrutiny, I not only completely missed the point of my being there but also let them down.

Luckily, for me I was disabused, while there was still time to redeem myself, by veteran UPI (ultimately Reuters) photographer Luciano Mellace who, in the middle of all the chaos, took me under his wing and set me straight. He is still doing it. 

In such circumstances if you are not doing your job you are just in the way.

There is no way reporting the deaths of thousands of people can be made palatable and without a human dimension there can be no concept of scale. Pictures like these are ‘upsetting’ for everyone who sees them because the circumstances in which they were taken are ‘upsetting’.

The subject matter is awful but these pictures from China brilliantly convey something  of that awfulness. They are not snap shots or random images plucked from the ether by picture editors, but the considered product of consumate professional photojournalists working in appalling circumstances to the very best of their abilities in order to communicate to all of us, the plight of the the victims of this terrible disaster, whether it is what we want to see or not.  

 Picture captions:

1) A father waits for his child, who has been buried for 33 hours in the rubble of a collapsed school, in the earthquake-hit Hanwang town of Mianzhu, Sichuan province, May 14, 2008. His son was found dead in the end. Picture taken May 14, 2008. REUTERS/Stringer (CHINA). 

2) A butterfly flies around the feet of dead students buried in the ruins of destroyed classrooms at a school in earthquake-hit Beichuan county, Sichuan province, May 15, 2008. The death toll from China’s massive earthquake could reach more than 50,000, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday, quoting rescue headquarters. REUTERS/Jason Lee (CHINA)

Thanks Paul.

The images of the earthquake relief effort in China have been horrifying and deeply moving and remind me what has always been so compelling about my job - the ease and speed with which still pictures can impart so much readily understood information to so many people.   

And what brilliant pictures they are.