Gas & Water
By Tim Wimborne
Coal Seam Gas drilling is controversial. It’s also worth billions.
Some Australians love it, some hate it. The issues are big and they are complex. The industry is expanding like wildfire and the story develops daily. To more effectively tell this very thin slice of the story I combined pictures with audio, text and time-lapse video.
I believe this sector of Australia’s massive resources boom has the potential to make major political shifts. While reporting on it a farmer, a traditionally conservative lot, said to me “thank god for the Greens”.
Gas & Water from Tim Wimborne on Vimeo.
Eleven hours
When I heard the news, I headed immediately to the scene; that’s what news photographers do.
I remembered a few days earlier I was reading a blog about Reuters photographer Shannon Stapleton going towards the biggest crime scene of recent times; Ground Zero in New York. A silly smile filled my face as, of course, my scene was a grain of sand in the desert compared to what Shannon faced on 9/11.
The breaking news was that a man had locked himself inside a lawyer’s office with his daughter and with what appeared to be a bomb strapped to himself, in west Sydney. After parking only 3 blocks away, I picked up a Canon Mark IV with a 500mm lens as my main camera, my second set up as spare with a 70-200mm, two bags with wide lenses, flash, extra batteries and my laptop to file from the scene and then: I ran.
Arriving at the scene my first concern was that the main subject was behind a window. Usually when stories are related to windows it involves a long wait. Almost every photographer can certify that. From sportsmen to celebrities, politicians or criminals, if the media is pointing to a window, 90% of the times the story heads for a long wait.
Soon after pointing my 500mm lens at the window, the face of the subject appeared for a few seconds and I took ten pictures. In coordination with the Reuters pictures desk in Singapore my first frame hit the Reuters wire within 3 minutes.
Hi Daniel, I have been following your work and I think it’s great!! I loved the new years photo of the harbour bridge. I’m studing photography myself, if you need a free hand to carry your stuff around while learning a bit I would love to do so!!!I hope you get to read this one day!!
All the best
Marcelo Tropea
Seahorse
There are Seahorses and then there are Seahorses.
You might find one in the most unlikely spot but the incredible surprise, every now-and-then, is an encounter in the most familiar places you live.
You probably know less than you thought.
Seahorse 2.0 from Tim Wimborne on Vimeo.
Six miles underground with a politician and no light
His main claim to fame to audiences overseas are his beachside antics. Beyond that, Australia’s conservative opposition leader doesn’t demand a whole lot of our work time.
However, I ended up next to him, underground, 10 kilometers (6 miles) into a coal mine.
Reuters just happened to be writing a piece about Tony Abbott and we write about mining many times every day Down Under. So here was a chance to match this piece while shooting lots of subterranean stock images.
Like all Reuters photographers now and then I am faced with shooting in very low light. This particular mine releases lots of methane gas, the stuff that caused an explosion at Pike River coal mine in New Zealand killing 29 men underground, a tragic story that I covered in November last year. The restrictions one works underground include:
- No flash - No tripod - No changing lenses - No other gear except camera with lens attached - No spare batteries - No light sources other than the mine’s supplied head lamp - No turning your camera on if an unsafe methane reading is detected within 20 meters of you - No wondering off by yourself - No leaving the main transit corridors - And a host of others I can’t remember
photography (fəˈtɒg rə fi) n. [PHOTO- + -GRAPHY] the process of producing images of objects by recording light or of other radiant energy on a photosensitive medium.
Money and dreams in Australia’s outback
Shooting the vast Australian outback had been my goal ever since I first arrived in Sydney. After three years I finally had the opportunity — a Special Report (a Reuters’ investigative story) on a worker shortage in the middle of Australia’s mining boom. My destination, Karratha, is a small town in Australia’s northwest.
After a more than 6 hour flight from Sydney, from one corner of Australia to the other, I touched down into a landscape exactly as I had imagined. The land was littered with red iron ore rocks, clear blue skies stretched with an immensity you only feel at sea, and trains, huge trains, hauled iron ore from the mines to be loaded onto ships bound for China.
This remote region called the Pilbara is at the center of Australia’s mining boom. But with more than AUD$400 billion in new resource projects on the drawing board, miners are struggling to find people who want to live and work in this harsh environment, despite offering wages in the six figures for truck drivers and construction workers – more than Australian doctors and lawyers earn.
It is sad to see this once lively and socially active town, being reduced to a place were people mainly work and sleep and social life is going down the drain. People have no time to to get involved with kids playing sports or other types of clubs. I’ve live there in the good years, from 1982 to 2008. Especially for kids it must be a boring town no. Service clubs such as Rotary, Lions etc can’t get new members because of the 12 hour shifts people have to work. To me it is a dying town.
Working in the pit lane without earplugs
Excitement best describes my feelings about Formula One racing. Ever since Ayrton Senna battled with Alain Prost in the late 80′s my heart was linked to this circus and more so when Colombian driver Juan Pablo Montoya won a place in the Williams team. He even managed to take the checkered flag in Monaco which was enough to make a whole country crazy.
Those were the days of being a sort of slave inside the dark room, learning and dreaming about having the opportunity to shoot at the side of a track, any track, Interlagos in Sao Paulo was the closest at that time, so it became my objective for years.
Moving to Australia brought my dream one step closer and I went to Albert Park in 2009 for my first ever Grand Prix.
This year, my third, the F1 calendar was modified and Australia became the season opening race. Reuters were responsible for covering the wire agency pool at Albert Park, a chance for me to experience my long held wish and shoot from the heart of this event. To be granted pit lane access for the race.
F1 cars are extremely loud. Although it’s hard to say I sympathize for you, it would be a dream to have pit lane access and shoot!
Clash of two cricketing titans
The second quarter-final of the cricket world cup was a clash between two huge teams. India, the world’s no. 1 team with its power batting lineup. Australia, three-time world champions who have reigned supreme over the game for 12 years. Whoever won, it would be a huge story. Whoever lost, it would be a huge story.
We headed to the stadium at around 10am, well before the 2.30pm start. Traffic was backed up a long way. There was only one road leading to it and we weren’t sure if it was fans waving flags and blowing horns, buses and four wheel drives, scooters or the cops that were in charge. Fellow photographer Andrew Caballero-Reynolds got nervous because on his last 3 trips to stadiums, the vehicle he’s been in has blown a tire. Lucky we made it in one piece. There were thousands of fans queuing in the searing heat to get into the ground, watched over by the usual stick-wielding police in khaki suits.
I installed a remote camera high on a TV tower above the stands, hooked up by usb cable to a laptop, both powered by a 25m extension cord we rented for 150 rupees (about 4 dollars) from a local shop that usually rents them out for weddings. The remote would capture the action from a different angle and would fire whenever I wanted it to from my field side position. I had the laptop running on a data card so the pictures would automatically be downloaded and transmitted to our editing system live, so that we didn’t have to wait for the break inbetween innings to get the disk and edit pictures. It was going to provide some great pictures from the match.
As it got closer to the start of the match, fans packed the stadium and the familiar chants began – “Jeeta bhai jeetega!! Indiaaaaa jeetega!!!” (We’ll win brother, we’ll win, India will win!!!) I was torn, as someone who was born in India but has an Australian passport, I wasn’t sure who to support. I decided to support New Zealand, my other nationality, to evade having to choose.
Australia had a fairly tame start to the match. Captain Ricky Ponting scored a century as Australia posted a total of 260. Amit Dave, Andrew and myself were burnt to a crisp in the unforgiving Gujarat heat as we covered the innings. At least I had water on my side; they forgot to bring any for the photographers at Andrew and Amit’s positions.
My date with Yasi
So, I was sitting on a plane flying from Sydney to a town called “Townsville” before I had a moment to consider that I was going north to intercept a huge cyclone, try and hide somewhere in the middle of it and stick my head up and start shooting as soon as it passed over me. In the end I was fully equipped, located and psyched to deal with a storm “roughly the size of Italy” but it was cyclone Yasi that blinked first.
When the decision was made to go I had 60 minutes before leaving for the airport. Photographers talk about a “go bag” or how they have a permanent disaster kit next to the front door or that they’re such legends, who have covered an untold number of natural disasters, everything they need is burned on their memory. I have a list. I have a number of lists but I still stand in the middle of the lounge room asking my wife what I have forgotten. She always comes up with something. Surprisingly, the flight (the very last one to this impending natural disaster before the destination airport closed) was packed. On it were a few other media types but also a bunch of paramedics, emergency workers and prison guards all going for the same reason.
First stop for my text and TV colleagues and I was the first gas station we found still trading as we headed still further north to Cairns – right into the path of the cyclone. Just about everything was closed with taped up windows or boarded up doors. We netted $250 worth of bottled water and the kind of food you’d only ever buy at a gas station.
After an early morning arrival and 60 minutes sleep, I was off into the approaching turmoil. With cameras wrapped in covers and an underwater housing I loitered around the Cairns waterfront for hours after the cyclone was due to arrive and shot the now empty city. Locals came to have a look for the approaching storm. Tourists came to look for it too. One man came and cooked a barbecue. Another celebrated his 50th birthday with beer in the light rain. Night fell, I went to bed and slept soundly with the balcony door wide open.
Floods and landslides: A global view
In recent months floods and heavy rain have affected many different parts of the world, from Australia where an area the size of France and Germany combined was under water to the devastating landslides in Brazil that killed over 500 people.
Here are three stories from photographers, Tim Wimborne in Australia, Tom Peter in Germany and Bruno Domingos in Brazil, detailing how they overcame the challenges they faced to get pictures on the wire.
AUSTRALIA Tim Wimborne
Huge floods have wreaked havoc across the globe. Australia has experienced some of the worst of it with headlines dominated by an “inland tsunami” killing many around the town of Toowoomba. The much larger flooding however was far more passive in its advance over millions of hectares and into the heart of Australia’s third largest city.
You can’t beat wrapping your camera in plastic and getting your wet feet to get great flood pictures. After all, papers are filled with images of people wading through the brown muck where once steps led to their front door but this story was a lot more about helicopters and social media.
from Russell Boyce:
Asia – A Week in Pictures January 23 2011
As India heads towards their Republic Day celebrations, Prime Minister Singh makes minor adjustments to his cabinet while outside on the streets people demonstrate over food and fuel price inflation and corruption. Adnan Abidi produces a great picture as a middle-aged demonstrator gets to feel the full force of a police water canon. In stark contrast, B Mathur gets a glimpse of the dress rehearsal of the full military parade planned to celebrate India's independence where the security forces are deployed in a somewhat different manner. Danish Siddiqui added to the file this week with a well seen picture to illustrate a government spending initiative with a man pulling a pipe across a building site, the shadow creating an eye like image that almost seems to wink at the viewer.
Police use water canons to disperse supporters of India's main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) during a protest in New Delhi January 18, 2011. Thousands of the supporters on Tuesday in New Delhi held a protest against a recent hike in petrol prices and high inflation. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi
Indian Border Security Force (BSF) soldiers ride their camels during the full dress rehearsal for the Republic Day parade in New Delhi January 23, 2011. India will celebrate its Republic Day on Wednesday. REUTERS/B Mathur
A labourer pulls an underground cable at a construction site of a commercial complex in Mumbai January 20, 2011. India plans to spend $1.5 trillion over 10 years to revamp its creaky infrastructure, which is seen as a brake on its economic growth. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui
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The Wall
great job on Tim .. Gas I believe that photojournalism is showing a new face, in which photographers to enhance the production of video journalism. With a different content of the major media outlets because they are copyrighted, show the author’s vision. Congratulations for the work, a hug.