Four Reuters photographers covered the recent attacks in India. Here Arko Datta, Jayanta Shaw and Desmond Boylan (Chief Photographer, India) recall events.

Jayanta Shaw
My first experience of the Taj Mahal Hotel had been as a teenager on holiday with my parents in Mumbai. Those were fond memories. I would never have thought my second encounter with the Mumbai landmark would be so dramatic, tragic and scary.

Arko Datta
Just the previous night, I was at the Trident-Oberoi hotel, shooting pictures at the Gucci shop on the ground floor, next to the main entrance of this five-star hotel.

But since there had been no warning of an impending threat, the city continued to go about its daily chores.

Wednesday was a long day at office, and just as I got home and settled down, the first call came in, of a firing at Leopold café. Mumbai is no stranger to trouble or gang-wars and that’s what most of us in the media thought this was, especially as the area where Leopold café stands is known to witness shadowy activity as the night wears on.

But in an instant came the news of another shoot-out at Chhattrapati Shivaji railway station that most of us refer to as Victoria Terminus or just VT.

I sensed there was more to these shoot-outs and I needed to move, and try to get more information on the way. I told my colleague Punit Paranjpe to go on to VT while I headed for Leopold.

On the way I was getting a flurry of calls - with the stories only getting more bizarre - firing and blasts were being reported out of the Taj Mahal and Trident-Oberoi hotels as well.

Slowly it became clear Mumbai was seeing attacks and sieges at different locations. I decided to head for the Taj Mahal hotel first, with reports of gun shots and blasts still being heard from there.

Even as I took cover near the hotel, came further information of a blast near Nariman House and another as far as Vile Parle, close to the domestic airport.

I called Punit and told him to file his first pictures ASAP, and I decided to move. As I walked towards Leopold, I heard a blast behind me near the Taj Hotel. I ran back, only to dive for cover as there were more blasts which turned out to be grenade explosions. People were running in panic, and the darkness added more to the chaos.

There was occasional gun fire from inside the hotel building, but there was very little to photograph. This is when I heard of a fire raging at the Oberoi-Trident. I rushed there, only to be kept at a safe distance by the cops, like the rest of the media. Just then, we got more news of an explosion near a petrol station! A few of us photographers sped off on bikes, getting images of the post-blast debris - a mangled car and two-wheelers and cops on guard at the site.

After criss-crossing the streets of South Mumbai, chasing every bit of news that was coming my way, I was back outside the Taj Mahal hotel.

As I shot pictures of the hotel on fire, my thoughts were to get these to clients as soon as possible, while ensuring I stayed out of the line of fire.

I prepared for a long vigil outside the Taj. The first pictures of the fire had gone and I was trying to digest the reality unfolding before my eyes. The dramatic events would last another forty-one hours, testing our endurance.

JS:
Earlier on the Wednesday, I was Guwahati, in the Indian north-east state of Assam, preparing to cover the India vs England cricket match . By 10pm that evening I was outside the Taj Mahal hotel smelling gunpowder in the air, with gunfire all around. I was thrilled for a while. I positioned myself behind a police van watching the hotel in flames before my eyes. I started shooting with my 80-200mm lens and Canon camera. Taking 15-20 frames I stopped at around 11pm to file my first pictures to our pictures desk.

DB:
Flying from New Delhi, I landed at Mumbai’s international airport on Thursday morning to reinforce our coverage - 11 hours had passed since the first shots were fired. The normally bustling terminal was deserted, giving me a strange feeling that something was very wrong,

I persuaded a reluctant cab driver to take me to the scene. Normally a 2-hour journey, it took 40 minutes through the deserted streets. Throughout he drive we listened to the radio. There were three confirmed locations under siege - Nariman House, The Taj Mahal and Trident Oberoi hotels .

Arko and Punit were already on the ground, busy trying to cover all angles of the ongoing story while chasing stringers for additional images.

JS:

Friday morning Arko called and directed me to Nariman House, the Jewish centre in Mumbai. I arrived at the police barricade after a 2 km walk and found panic-stricken locals watching from the rooftops. It was like a war scene. The sounds of a helicopter startled me.

Commandos were firing at Nariman House from the helicopter. I moved to a rooftop to get a better shooting angle.

The roar of helicopters and exchange of gunfire made a scene reminiscent of a Hollywood blockbuster. Arko informed me rescued people were coming out of the Oberoi Trident hotel, so I ran there.

DB:
For the next few hours I walked around. I heard sporadic AK47 gunfire, and I could hear explosions coming from inside the Trident Oberoi, where hundreds of silent onlookers were gathered.

Hours later, I was still dragging my luggage through the streets and several people approached me asking if I was an escaped hotel hostage. Eventually, I managed to check in to my hotel on the Marine drive.

We established the hotel as a pictures-editing centre. Using its wireless network, we could operate several laptops simultaneously. We used it as a charging point for phones, laptops and camera batteries. It was adrenalin that kept us going.

At the Taj, where the rampage ended, the media behaved like the pigeons and seagulls that perched on the building itself, scattering after each volley of gunfire or explosion, only to return to their initial positions.

AD:
During the city siege, Mumbai was panic-stricken, with only a whiff of rumour enough to send people rushing for cover and closing their shutters.

The city’s famed spirit had worn thin, people were shaken. They were feeling vulnerable and exposed by the lack of security. Theaters and other haunts were quiet as residents digested the uncomfortable reality that terror had struck at the heart of the country’s financial capital.

DB:
We relied on our instincts backed up by solid information on the ground, knowing from the beginning it was impossible for the four of us to staff each siege location round the clock – each one had over five positions to be manned, some of them dangerous and where you could be stuck for hours, others quickly changing as security forces would push us back.  Uncertainty and worries of how long the rampage was going to last went through our minds.

We made sure our first priority was safety, we worked sometimes together at the same location, covering each other. Arko and Punit, our photographers in Mumbai, had done their homework — this was the key to our success, managing a solid local network of contacts in a moment of crisis. From the start, we had all angles covered, we had planned for such a situation.

It was just a matter of putting it all into place and remaining calm.

One of the unspoken duties concerning our blanket coverage of the President when he is in public is the “death watch”, which is, quite simply, being there “in case” something terrible should happen.  It is the reason the Associated Press photographs each and every take off and landing of Air Force One or Marine One, just “in case” a terrible mishap should occur during take-off or landing,  or somewhere in between. We don’t carry our blanket coverage to that extreme, but we certainly are with the “body” whenever he is in public.

Now here’s the thing. Our job is  really not unlike that of the Secret Service that protects “the body”. But, 99.99999 percent of the time nothing happens. So how do you stay constantly alert and at the ready in case something does happen. Well, the Secret Service certainly is. That is their sole purpose. But photographers? Well, we tend to walk about during a presidential event, looking for different angles, or simply taking a breather when we think we have exhausted the photo opportunities of the event. Often, we have our eyes deeply embedded in our laptops, filing photos as the President is still speaking. So, are we always as alert and fixed upon “the body” as the Secret Service is? Of course not.

So, imagine our surprise when a man hurls a pair of shoes at the President. I had taken a position side on, midway between the podiums and the back press riser. I had anticipated that would be a good position for the signing of documents that was due to occur immediately after the remarks from the podiums. The setting of the remarks was incredibly unremarkable for photo possibilities, so after shooting that, I had moved to prepare for the signing of documents hoping for better.

About 10-feet from me I heard a loud voice. Protester? Probably. Not unusual at a Presidential event. My camera was trained on the President. The voice caught my attention again, so after the President ducked from the first shoe, I immediately turned to see where it came from. By that time, the second shoe had been thrown and the culprit was already on the ground, smothered by Iraqi security and Secret Service agents who skirmished directly beneath me.

All I could see was backs and butts, but I held my camera aloft hoping to get something dramatic. I never saw the culprit’s face. There were so many agents on top of him; they dragged them off, again, backs toward me. I pondered following, but thought better of it, remembering my job is to stay with the President. To the sound of blood-curdling howls as the culprit was being taken away and beaten, I returned to the front of the room to document President Bush’s reaction.

Secret Service agents stood around a visibly shaken President. President Bush appealed for calm and for people to take their seats and resume the remarks. Using various quips, he tried to lower the tension, but it was quite apparent this incident would leave a deep impression on his mission here, replacing all the words of hope that had been spoken before the shoes began flying.

As the President and Iraqi Prime Minister returned to the podiums and finished off the remarks, President Bush looked down at me kneeling in the front row, and winked at me, his way of saying all is fine. I nodded back; my way of trying to reassure him all was okay. It was one of the few moments of interaction I have experienced with the man in eight years of coverage. At that moment, I felt pity, but also saw him as a man, a friend even, not just the President.

As we faced the challenges of trying to get our photos from the incident out as quickly as possible, stories flew about, and we gradually tried to piece together all that had happened. As time went by, it was clear that the video cameras in the back captured the whole incident with the best angle and that the papers would most likely use grabs of those images over our stills.

It was a difficult moment for still cameras to cover in full. Do you train the camera at the culprit or the President? Split second decisions had to be made by reflex, there was no time to think. The light at the front (where the President stood) was dim but sufficient. Light where the reporters and shoe-thrower sat was dim at best.  Technically, a photographic nightmare really. There was no flash was on my camera, and no time to properly change my settings. All I could do was reduce my shutter speed and hope for one or two decent frames.

I finally got to watch the video upon my return to the U.S. I realized that at the time I never even knew two shoes had been thrown. What I saw on TV amazed me. The President had amazingly fast reflexes!!  Humorous as it seemed, I could not forget how it ruined the President’s mission, nor could I forget the screams of pain as the shoe-thrower was taken away.

It is a White House photographer’s nightmare to think about something happening to the President and missing it completely. Each of the wire photographers on this trip managed to get a frame or two which helped tell the story, but there would be no “moment” image. I think all were glad that it was only shoes, and not something more lethal. The President tried to laugh off the event with some clever jokes, but we photographers were thinking “what if” and that was nothing to laugh about.

The city of Pawtucket in Rhode Island offers a vivid glimpse into the depth of America’s worsening recession — and a warning of the dangers of rising unemployment.

View Brian Snyder’s audio slideshow from Pawtucket here. To read the feature story by Boston Bureau Chief Jason Szep, click here.

Two hours after the news broke about a military jet crashing into San Diego homes, I received an email to You Witness from Ron Belanger with a link to dramatic photos of the incident. Here is Ron's account of events.

I was working at home near MCAS Miramar in San Diego mid-day Monday, when I heard the unmistakable "pop… pop…" sound of ejection seats firing nearby but hadn't heard the jet's engines. As a retired Navy pilot and aircraft accident investigator I suddenly realized this meant that a pilotless aircraft and ejection seats would soon be coming down. I took cover under my desk then heard a deafening sound as the plane crashed and the house shook violently.

When I ran outside there was a large black cloud of smoke rising and I could feel the heat. I tried to call 911 but the line was already busy as other witnesses called in the emergency. I grabbed my shoes and camera and ran down to the scene which is five houses over from mine. Several of us asked neighbors if there was anyone in the house. Since that wasn't known, we went down the right side, where part of the house was still standing, shouting out to anyone inside but there was no answer… just the roar of the fire and the sound of small explosions. We couldn't go in because the house was fully involved in flames at every opening we found. As we were checking out the back yard, a propane tank from the camper which had been pushed into the house exploded. We quickly retreated since there was nothing we could do.

Pilots and investigators who arrive early on an accident scene are trained to document the scene and take photos if possible so that's what I did. Copies of the pics are being provided to the accident investigators and public safety agencies.

We received Ron's images shortly afterwards and quickly had our senior photographer contact him and negotiate a payment and rights of usage. A little over an hour later, the images were on the Reuters Pictures wire and sent around the world. Ron has received calls from friends and family globally after they saw his images online and in print.

A selection of other You Witness images used on the wire can be found here.

A Congolese refugee in a tattered baseball cap, worn clothes and blue flip-flops begged me for a cigarette at Kibati, a camp for 65,000 people displaced by fighting in eastern Congo.

I scolded him, saying smoking was bad for his health, as if anything could be worse for your health than living in this conflict-racked corner of Democratic Republic of Congo.

Machine gun fire erupted nearby and people dived for cover, ducking into rows of flimsy tents made from torn sheets of white plastic stretched over sticks.

“Mister, mister, come lie down in here,” a voice called from one tent as bullets hummed nearby like an electrical current.

I snapped a few blurry pictures of people running before crawling through the curtain door of the tent, where a man and two children huddled on the ground. I kneeled above them and took a few more photographs.

“When you hear gunshots, if you lie flat, you can be OK, but if you stay up like that, paff!” said the man, Boniface Buhoro, a tailor who had fled weeks of combat further north in an area now controlled by anti-government Tutsi rebels.

Several people had already been killed by gunfire in this refugee camp in North Kivu province at the foot of Nyiragongo volcano on the front lines between Congo’s army and advancing rebels. At least two more were killed in the next few days.

For 45 minutes, I lay with my legs intertwined with Buhoro’s, his three-year-old son Sadiki wedged between us.

Army boots crunched past outside over black lava rock as soldiers fired their weapons at full stride.

At first we assumed rebels were attacking, but in fact drunken army troops were fighting each other, shooting randomly.

In the panic, soldiers went from tent to tent robbing refugees who had already lost almost everything, typical behavior for the badly paid and poorly disciplined army.

“Every day, something like this happens. They rob and steal and kill us or rape the girls. We don’t even have anything to eat, but they take what they want,” said Buhoro.

I crawled outside as things calmed down.

The man who’d asked me for a cigarette lay face down.

“He’s dead already — stress,” said someone in the small crowd around the body. He had apparently died of heart seizure.

This is how many Congolese die: if not by the gun, then from conflict-induced illnesses, preventable diseases or hunger in a resource-rich but shattered nation lacking infrastructure.

More than five million people have died, most from lack of access to food or basic health, during a decade of fighting and upheaval in Congo, according to aid agencies. This makes Congo’s enduring conflict the deadliest since World War Two.

I spent two years in Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda from 2002 to 2004, covering the regional war that engulfed much of central Africa. The day I took shelter with Boniface was the first on my latest trip to report again on Congo’s seemingly unending cycle of violence.

Most of the victims perish far from sight, deep in the bush.

This time, death seemed all around.

Driving to the front line early one morning, mist hung over the road and smoke from Nyiragongo volcano darkened the sky.

Marking the first rebel position were the bodies of two government soldiers, a bullet through each of their skulls.

Traveling north later, I reached the hilltop village of Kirumba, where local Mai-Mai militiamen had clashed with government troops fleeing the Tutsi rebel advance.

The army quickly buried their dead, but the Mai-Mai corpses were set on fire by beer-drinking troops.

I found them the next morning, fat still bubbling on one charred corpse, its genitals cut off. Another body had an umbrella stabbed into its face. Soldiers joked and laughed.

Back near Kibati camp, I followed a funeral procession into a sun-dappled banana grove. A tiny purple casket containing the body of eight-month old Alexandrine Kabitsebangumi, who had died from cholera, was being lowered into the dark earth.

The grove was filled with graves. As women sang a haunting hymn, the mourners moved aside, allowing me to photograph.

There’s no joy getting a good picture from a baby’s funeral.

Another victim, another memory, another ghost.

After two weeks, I left Congo, crossing into Rwanda.

As my car climbed the steep hills, providing stunning scenic views back into Congo — that beautiful, terrible place — I passed another procession carrying a body on a bamboo stretcher.

I didn’t stop. I just kept driving.

People often ask “what is the hardest sport to shoot?”. I always say “downhill skiing”. Sure there are 5 hour long baseball games and 5 day cricket matches, football games in the rain, sleet and snow. Heck just making it through an Olympic games is a bit like boot camp. But when you add up all the work and skill that goes into making a good downhill skiing picture, for me, it’s the most difficult sport to shoot.

Lake Louise hosts “Winterstart” each year. The season’s first World Cup alpine downhill skiing races is held at what has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth. They come because Lake Louise is cold.

It’s beautiful, but it’s cold. If it’s -20c when you head up the hill in the morning with 50 lbs of cameras on your back it’s an average day. The cold means snow making , and they always have enough snow here early in the season to hold the races; take that global warming!

Now downhill skiing is hard not just because you’re having to shoot a skier coming at you at over 100 kilometers an hour , but the course they ski is some 3 km long and you need to find a position to shoot the race. You need to think about what the line will be, how the skier will come in and out of your limited focal range. You place your bet, set up your gear and wait for the race. Photographers have to be in position one hour before race time, so now you have to say warm. There are lots of ways to do this, but good ski boots, hand warmers, toe warmers and good gloves are essential. Ask any photographer that works in the cold and they will not have enough fingers on there hand to count all the different type of gloves they have tried.

So your camera is out . Your lens is usually long , meaning over 400mm. The skiers come fast. Safety has become a huge concern of the race organizers so each year we get pushed farther and father away from where we want to be on the course. The 400mm lens turns to a 600mm lens and 600’s turn to 800’s and now your dealing with F5.6 and very little depth of field. You become a little more blinded in picking up the skier as they come into range the longer the lens. The best pictures usually come from a lip or edge in the snow, that helps separate the skier and his skis and gives the picture depth. It also makes the position more blind as your down below the skier and they just appear on the edge of the lip out of nowhere, and zoom, they are gone. We are able to work around this by knowing when the timing intervals are for each race, if the racers leave the start every 1:15 seconds we can time our watches so we have a better idea of when to put your glove on a frozen lens and a frozen camera to your face. This all goes to hell if they have to make any repairs to the course, or a racer goes down. Then it’s back to a waiting game, making sure you don’t breath too hard and fog up your viewfinder. I would say most of what I shoot is zone focused, you focus on a location on the course where you think the skier will come through and then hit the button when they do. The new cameras are capable of autofocus, but that means being able to pick up the skier and hold them on target, it works for some positions, but for others it’s not the best option.

So you have been standing on the side of a mountain for an hour or more (not counting the time and effort it took to get there) and the race begins. There are more than 60 racers usually, but realistically the winner will come out of the top 40 at 2 minute intervals. That means another 80 minutes trying to stay warm and not miss a single racer, because anyone can win and you need to have the winner.
I filed from my position this year. Using an OQO, our paneikon software an EVDO cell card and the help of Shaun Best to edit from the bureau in Montreal. We had our action from the hill on the wire before anyone else. Andy Cark was at the finish area and Shaun was able to edit him off the snow as well. With all the effort our images made it into Europe to make deadlines from an 1130am race in Western Canada. The men travel down to Colorado for the next week of races and the women arrive here for the start of their downhill season.
Then it’s home to California to warm up.