Photographers Blog

Everton, England

By Nigel Roddis

With heavy snow and the threat of flooding, conditions were never going to be pleasant for the Tough Guy Challenge on the so-called killing fields of Perton, central England. Five thousand competitors push themselves each year in this charity obstacle race held on a 600-acre farm since 1987.

The mud was deep and the car park, as I would later learn, was treacherous. I waded through the mud with my cameras taped up inside carrier bags and was out of breath before the races even started, though I was only taking the photographs. Having already covered the event three times, I knew that the competitors tend to start the day on a high; singing and dancing like they’re off for a stroll in the park. Even after the canon sounded and they hurtled down the hill to start the 15 km race packed with over 20 obstacles, they seemed unaware that over a third of them wouldn’t finish.

GALLERY: TOUGH GUY CHALLENGE

Within 100 yards of the start I found the first casualties. Three people had lost their shoes in the mud and couldn’t find them, bringing their race to an abrupt end. The first main obstacle was a U-shaped canal full of thick ice which the competitors had to wade through, many of them screaming in the freezing water. To photograph it I had to edge along a slippery beam over the icy abyss and even then I couldn’t really do the task justice.

Further down the course people had really begun to struggle. As if the deep, cold mud wasn’t enough, one of the later parts involved diving into a series of icy pools before jumping over burning straw. By this stage I was covered in mud from head to toe and it’s a miracle the camera was still working. I was constantly wiping the lenses but mud and water was flying in all directions.

The obstacle I think most people feared was a series of poles under which they had to duck into the icy muddy water. As if that wasn’t enough when they popped up I was there with my wide angle lens and a blast of flash just for good measure.

Merzig, Germany

By Lisi Niesner

“You can join me and pick up the deer carcass”, German wolf researcher Werner Freund invited me as he climbed into his lorry. I quickly jumped in. A rotten smell of meat hit me. I thought I wouldn’t smell it after a while but this proved to be a very false assumption. We chatted while driving and he told me about his education as a gardener and his first botanical job at the Stuttgart zoo. Soon, his job turned into a predator zookeeper after the initial bear keeper was injured. “I have cataracts, but have heard it can be treated very well today”, he suddenly added. I started monitoring his driving suspiciously until we reached a house, not far from the French border. There it lay in the snow, directly on the driveway. He asked me to give him a hand, and in view of the fact that Werner Freund is almost 80 years old, it was just polite to help him load the animal’s cadaver. On the way back I told him I had never loaded or even touched a dead deer, which seemed to amuse him.

GALLERY: LIVING WITH WOLVES

Back at his home he changed clothes to confront the Mongolian wolves pack with a familiar odor. I was curious. Werner opened the door of the fence and entered the enclosure. First the alpha male wolf Heiko, came towards him and licked his mouth which is a sign of acknowledgment and a sign of membership of the pack. After this ritual Werner got the deer cadaver, put it on the snowy ground, lay down and held it in a manner as if it were his prey. As a child I was told, like most other children, the tale of little red riding hood making me wary of the big bad wolf with bared teeth on display. Unexpectedly the pack was shy and approached carefully. Werner took over his role and bit into the leg of the deer but spat out the raw meat. I was too busy trying to shoot pictures through the wire-netting fence, to wonder what was going on in front of me. None of the wolves competed with him for the food.

In the afternoon I met Werner at the enclosure of the Arctic wolves, he had changed his jacket again. It was terrific watching the beautiful white animals howling in anticipation. They recognize the sound of Werner’s car and were excited long before he arrived at the gate. “From the moment the wolf cubs taste meat and blood, they turn into predators and cannot be domesticated like dogs”, he said while entering the enclosure with a bucket of meat. From when the Arctic wolf Monty, named after the horse whisperer Monty Roberts, and the female wolf Deborah had a litter of cubs, Werner began feeding the cubs from the mouth. It was incredible that the whole pack adopted this behavior.

St. Moritz, Switzerland

By Arnd Wiegmann

In 2000 I covered my first bobsleigh world championship for Reuters in the eastern German town of Altenberg. A lot of world cups and the 2007 world championships in the Swiss mountain resort of St. Moritz followed. Since I moved from Berlin to Zurich at the end of 2007, the annual Bobsleigh World Cup in St. Moritz has been one of my favorite events in our calendar, as it combines working in beautiful surroundings whilst shooting pictures of a breathtaking sport.

But I had never tried to get a chance to feel the speed and gravity aboard a bobsled going down an ice track. A few weeks ago I asked the manager of the Olympia Bob Run Roberto Triulzi for a
permit to place two Gopro cameras on a four-man bobsled to take a video during one of the guest rides, which are offered for interested people. Triulzi agreed and I traveled to St. Moritz to meet Donald Holstein, the leader of the bobsleigh school and one of the pilots for the guest rides.

I placed the small cameras on the four-man in front of Donald and another on the helmet of brakeman Peter Liechti. Once the ride was over, I removed the cameras as my name was called out by the speaker: ‘Mr. Wiegmann, please come to the start!’. Surprisingly there was one place left in the bobsleigh and I was booked for the next ride.

Baran, India

By Danish Siddiqui

When I first took pictures of this child couple in a small village in the desert state of Rajasthan in 2010, I had no idea that I would come back to this village again. But life had something else in store and I have been visiting them every year since, documenting the changes in their relationship and their surroundings.

When I went to their house last week I was greeted by the loud wailing of a baby. It was their four-month-old son Alok, which means enlightenment in Hindi. Last year when I visited them, I learned that Krishna, the child bride, was seven months pregnant. I wasn’t surprised at all but out of curiosity I asked Gopal, her husband, why he was in such a hurry to expand the family. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Nothing else to do, no work, life is so boring.” I was a bit taken aback.

Those like me who live in big cities and metros plan meticulously before taking the plunge into parenthood. And here this teenager was telling me that he wanted to have a child and risk his young wife’s life because of boredom. That, again, is a different India.

Chicago, Illinois

By John Gress

UPDATE: January 24th

You never know how the assignment is going to go when you decide to put on the same clothes you had on the day before. Why? Because they smell like smoke!

I made a return trek to the ice castle today, an abandoned warehouse which has been burning for three days. Quite surprising considering most of the building has collapsed and is covered in inches of ice.

While covering the blaze today, I photographed firefighter Michael De Jesus covered in icicles. When he told me his name I asked, “Do you know Charley?”

Craigellachie, Scotland

By David Moir

Scotch whisky is big business. With sales well over 5 billion pounds per year it’s an industry that has gripped the growing middle classes around the world. Including in countries where sales previously struggled and with drinks industry companies eager to quench that thirst with huge modern computer run distilleries being built around the globe producing more and more of the liquid.
But one thing still remains true in its production, oak casks.

Whisky isn’t Scotch Whisky unless it has been distilled in Scotland and matured for a minimum of three years in an oak cask which comes in various capacities from a Pin to a Butt. ‘Cooper’s’ are the tradesmen who build and repair the oak casks and barrels, their skills passed down from generations show no signs of entering the hi-tech world. They use tools such as a dowelling stock, flagging iron, inside shave and a hollowing knife to name a few.

I visited the Speyside Cooperage which started as a family business in 1947, in the small village of Craigellachie in northern Scotland, or the Malt Whisky Trail as it is also lovingly known. There they repair and build up to 150,000 oak casks a year, with each ‘cooper’ still being paid per cask, working on 20-30 per day like it always has been. The hardest workers can earn up to 60,000 pounds.

Wengen, Switzerland

By Ruben Sprich and Pascal Lauener

Ruben Sprich

The Lauberhorn, the world’s longest men’s alpine skiing World Cup downhill race, boasts 50 start gates at a 2315 meter altitude on the Lauberhorn in front of the Eiger North Face, the Moench and the Jungfrau with the Top of Europe, and ends 4415 meters later in Wengen at a 1287 meter altitude. Wengen is a small village in the Lauterbrunnen valley near Interlaken in the Bernese Overland.

I remember in 1986 when I covered the Lauberhorn for my first time. We carried the 60 kg heavy black and white laboratory and the transmitter in a big box from Lauterbrunnen in the train up to Wengen and set up in the bathroom of our hotel in Wengen. This was in addition to our skies, boots, clothes and cameras. Much more heavy was our luggage with our color laboratory in the 90s.

For several years now we have stayed at a hotel on the Kleine Scheidegg, the Bellevue des Alpes, located at 2061 meters, which is between Wengen and the Lauberhorn. Since 1999 we’ve used digital cameras. In the 80s and 90s after the race we rushed back to our hotel to start developing film, choose the pictures and make prints, writing captions on a small Hermes baby typewriter, and transmitting our pictures to Zurich or London. This year Bern based staff photographer Pascal Lauener and myself covered the races using our Paneikon software which transmits the pictures instantly after each racer to our server in Vienna where our Editor Michael Leckel edited and processed the pictures we sent in. Minutes later our clients around the world get the pictures in their systems.

Rio de Janiero, Brazil

By Pilar Olivares

On the first day I appeared as a stranger, to photograph them without knowing their history or their story. The second day I understood what was going on and was able to talk with them at length about what they were doing. The third day I sat and had coffee with them, laughed with them, and listened to them talk about their villages and how hard it is to be in the city.

They are Indians from Brazil’s most remote corners, about to be evicted from the place where they have lived for over six years, the historic Indian Museum next to the famous Maracana soccer stadium.

The eldest of the group told me, “In the city you need money. You can’t do anything without it. In my village I just fish, live in the forest, and listen to the sounds of nature. What do I need money for?”

Innsbruck, Austria

By Dominic Ebenbichler

The tragedy of Dutch Prince Johan Friso, who was buried in an avalanche while skiing in Austria last February and who has since been in a coma, generated the idea to shoot a story about freeride skiing and how ski professionals are trying to minimize any possible risks.

I’m lucky to have easy access to some of the best European freeride skiers as they are either part of my family or good friends with whom I go skiing with. I asked one of my cousins, Christoph Ebenbichler, who is a professional skier, if he would like to be part of this story. We discussed the riders who we wanted to work with on the story and the basic topics we wanted to cover, and decided to focus on showing the beauty of skiing in the back country combined with showing the professional approach everybody should have when skiing off piste. I contacted the skiers and they were all happy to work with me on the project.

Shooting freeride skiing requires a lot of preparation, organization and flexibility, especially in terms of getting up really early. We had to decide what time, which day and where we would go and of course we had to check the snow conditions and look at all possible avalanche risk reports.

New Delhi, India

By Mansi Thapliyal

My city is known as the so-called “rape capital of the country”. They say it’s unsafe, it’s dangerous, it’s full of wolves looking to hunt you down. A lot of it may be true. As a single woman working, living and breathing in New Delhi, I have had my fair share of stories. But the labels and opinions associated with the city were accepted on one level – no one questioned them, no one asked why – until a brutal tragedy one cold December night which shook the world and forced everyone (the authorities, the public, the lawmakers) to ask themselves uncomfortable questions and focus the on safety of women. It is still an ongoing, raging debate, thank heavens.

Meanwhile, I decided to focus on what Delhi’s women face and what they think about it. How do they go on with their lives, their work, their families? Just trying to understand the magnitude of how unsafe India’s capital is became one of the most challenging and emotionally exhausting assignments of my career.

SLIDESHOW: INDIA’S WOMEN DEFEND THEMSELVES

From call center executives to advertising professionals to tea stall workers, everyone has their stories and how they cope with it. Take the example of Chandani, 22, one of the few female cab drivers in the city. As she drove me around the city, a policeman stopped us at a barricade near India Gate. When he saw that a woman was driving the cab, he scraped his jaw off the floor. “You also drive a cab?” he said with an expression that suggested that he had spotted the Abominable Snowman. “I am doing a very unconventional job for women. Given that I do night shifts, I carry pepper spray and I’m trained in self-defense. Initially I faced a lot of problems but driving cabs at night has helped me overcome my fears,” Chandani said.