Getting your point across
With the Olympics now only a month away the search for scene-setting images to tempt the visual palate has begun in earnest. From the Beijing file Henry Lee gives us this to kick start the week - Wei Shengchu, 58, a supporter of traditional Chinese medicine, poses for photos in front of Beijing Railway Station with his head covered with acupuncture needles depicting 205 national flags and an Olympic torch, 7, 2008. Local media reported that Wei wanted to express his good wishes for the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games as well as to promote traditional Chinese medicine.
And it is all his own work, all 205 and something more substantial representing the Olympic flame, painstakingly inserted into his head to the obvious entertainment of passersby.
Even in this low resolution the Stars and Stripes, the Swiss, French, Canadian, Brazilian and a host of other national flags, are fairly easily spotted but not the Union Jack.
Maybe he just forgot it, or perhaps it occupies a place in the shade where the sun has finally set on the British Empire.
Heads you win
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.
Its hard to digest that Chelsea lost the match…but the luck was on manu’s side, which was more than obvious in the 2nd half….the shots deflected by the post, drogba getting a red card and the panelty (accidently) missed by jhon terry all went in favor of manu…nothing went right…in the end i just have one question for Avram Grant…why shevchenko was not utilized in the field in so many matches of champions league??? being one of the key players in chelsea
Close enough…
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
Why I became a news photographer – continued
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.
what a heartbreaking experience. but at least, you’ve found your calling. good luck!
Why I became a news photographer
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.
Great pictures. Photographing life in crisis is always a challenge for photographers. Close, stark, intimate but not offensive. Telling the story as it is without intruding. Capturing moments, while all around you are so stunned that they don’t even realise you’re there.
Without images like these, how would the rest of the world know what has happened. Caring and compassion are evoked when the lens captures those moments which most of us dread.
Someone commented “Please help China”.
Well, here in British Columbia, Canada, the Provincial Government is considering the initiative of supplying lumber with which to build semi-permanent ‘shelters’. These modules would be built to house hundreds of thousands of people. This could be a great boost for our forest industry which has suffered harsh times in the last few years(Closures of sawmills etc). Our Northern forests are being ravaged by the pine beetle, rendering most of the trees unuseable. But helping China, by providing shelter, may be one way of turning things around.
Overtaken by events
It is a bizarre image – the red and white Formula One car hangs in the air above the black and white one in what appears to be an unconventional overtaking manouvre until you notice the loose bits. The caption reads, “Force India Formula One driver Giancarlo Fisichella of Italy (top) and Williams Formula One driver Kazuki Nakajima of Japan crash after the start of the F1 Grand Prix of Turkey at Istanbul Park May 11, 2008. REUTERS/Karoly Arvai (TURKEY)”.
Fisichella took off after shunting Nakajima on the first bend. The collision was dramatic but while it trashed the cars, neither driver was hurt although they couldn’t agree about whose fault it was.
It wasn’t a complete disaster. Force India’s sponsors must be very encouraged, their sign says “Fly Kingfisher” and it does guys, it really does.
Great pic!The Life of an Aussie Immigrant
By Daniel Munoz
After a 24-hour flight, three almost deadly wrong-way turns while driving jetlagged in Sydney and a soccer game with the Thomson-Reuters team (of course we won 2-0), things are looking good in Australia.
When you come to Sydney from a country like Colombia your life changes in an unforgettable way, my first couple of hours here were full of exciting feelings. Tim Wimborne, my boss here, picked me up at the airport and took me and my wife straight to Lady Macquaries Chair, a park with the best view of Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge. It was the best possible introduction to this city and filled our eyes with tears of joy.
Shooting is no less joyful here with four swimming world records, the Olympic torch relay in Canberra, Cate Blanchet, nice standalones and the fashion week in Sydney makes for a file rich in colour and makes me happy too.
Strange… what us?
On first impression it’s enough to put a nesting Robin off its stride for good and liable to bring other garden creepers into disrepute - but it’s just the English celebrating Spring.
The caption to Toby Melville’s picture informs us, “A costumed festival participant marches in the Jack In The Green procession in Hastings in southern England May 5, 2008. The traditional annual May Day festival has origins at least as far back as the 17th century, with hundreds of costume-clad dancers and musicians – many dressed in green foliage – marching through the coastal town and symbolically slaying a giant Jack at the finale.”.
Some are more ‘out’ than others.
A postcard from Malawi
From Mabvuto Banda, Namitete, Malawi, May 2
- Bernard Banda makes $5 a day carrying people on his bicycle, good money in a country where more than half the 13 million people live below a dollar a day. “I charge MK70 (50 U.S. cents) per trip and on a good day I make about MK700 ($5) or more,” Bernard says.
Banda is not the only one cashing in on a bicycle transport industry now booming because of the rising costs of fuel pushed up by strong global oil prices. Along Mchinji road — the highway linking Malawi to Zambia’s eastern province — colourfully decorated bicycles are neatly parked, waiting to transport students to a nearby government college, nursing staff to a hospital and visitors around the area. The bicycles are remodelled to suit the business. A second seat is attached to the bicycle behind the driver’s seat. The passenger seat is finished in colourful but cheap leather, comfortably sized to accommodate any size of passenger. Stand by the roadside for just a few minutes and you can see how important the bicycles are to the area. Bernard is hired to transport a bag of maize. Another driver picks up a new passenger and cycles off. “To do this you have to be strong because sometimes we ride uphill carrying a passenger or hired to transport a bag of maize,” says Langiton Sitima. This form of transport is fast-becoming a common sight across Malawi. In each province the bikers are called by different names.
“This form of transport is our future. I can no longer afford to pay K150 ($1) a day for a one-way trip using public transport,” says Maggie Yotamu, a student at the College of Natural Resources which is along the route the bicycles service. In the capital Lilongwe and its surrounding districts they call the bikers “Kabadza”, which means hard worker. In the Northern Province they call them “Sacramento”, named after the Brazilian buses that ply the long routes across the country. To underscore the importance of the bicycle, police have been organising identity cards for these bikers. “In most cases police have moved in because we recognise that they are giving a very important service to the public and therefore we give them identity cards for security purposes,” police spokesperson Willie Mwaluka told Reuters.
Pictures by Siphiwe Sibeko
The Boris and Ken show
Yesterday May 1 saw voters in England and Wales go to the polls to elect their local authority representatives. Londoners will have to wait until this evening to know who will be their new mayor but it is hard to imagine that it won’t be either the incumbent Labour Party candidate Ken Livingstone or the Conservative challenger Boris Johnson. Whatever the merits or otherwise of the other contenders, this has pretty much been a two horse race almost from the start.
Some reports have said that Mayor Ken Livingstone has looked rather weary and Stephen Hird’s picture (which appears on the front of yesterday’s FT), shows him taking a break from the last day of campaigning, at what is colloquially know in this country as a ‘greasy spoon’ cafe. Intended, I suspect, to demonstrate his ‘just-like-us-ness’. It may in fact have succeeded rather too well because he does look just like any other tired old bloke.
Traditional symbols have been mercilessly exploited. Boris, an old Etonian had as his campaign bus one of the famous old red Routemaster London buses that Ken, as mayor, banished from service (Toby Melville).
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