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.
Two typhoons. One tragedy.
By Cheryl Ravelo
Two years after the devastating typhoon Ketsana hit Manila on September 26, followed by Typhoon Parma a week later, I thought this year would just be to commemorate the tragedy of those twin typhoons whose magnitude of destruction was historic for this country. But, I never knew we would relive it again, and this time with much greater damage brought by Typhoons Nesat and Nalgae.
When I went out to cover Nesat, I said to myself it’s just another typhoon, got some pictures of school cancellations, knee-deep flooding and villagers pre-emptively evacuating with their families, belongings and pets.
But the situation seemed to be getting worse when Bobby started photographing the already flooded U.S. Embassy along Manila Bay, something that has never happened in recent history. Storm surges created waves as high as the coconut trees lining the seawall. An oil tanker ran aground, almost hitting hundreds of shanties along the coastline of south harbor.
Walking the glacier
By Lisi Niesner
Usually I am absolutely not a fan of places where a mass of tourists assemble. I hate standing in line, dislike crowded sights, do not endure guides, prefer to eat meals characteristic of the country I’m visiting and I particularly cannot stand how functional tourists dress in their newly bought outdoor clothing – even if it is not necessary at all. That wind and water repellent jacket, those pants with a cooling fiber effect and, of course, the super soft sneaker shoes replacing the aerated sandals.
However, it has become a routine of mine to visit my relatives who live in the Zillertal valley but I had never visited the tourist attractions in the area. The Zillertal valley, located in the western Alps in the Austrian province of Tyrol, is well known for their “hardcore” tourism that has been operating for years.
It has never been easier to reach the top of a mountain or a glacier without shedding a drop of sweat. The expenses amount to around 30 euros and after a 30 minute ride on the cable car you will get access to a stunning view! On clear days you can look infinitely far.
Retracing my steps in Pakistan
On August 7, 2010, with a camera in hand, I dropped into a flooded village on an army helicopter that was delivering food aid to marooned villagers. As a crewman slid the door open to find solid ground, I leaped out, took some photographs, and managed to get back on before the chopper departed.
Time stamps on the images show the hover-stop lasted less than the length of an average song. For those three minutes, my thoughts were focused on finding an image that would bring the Pakistan floods story to life.
After getting back to base, I worded the caption, “Marooned flood victims looking to escape grab the side bars of a hovering Army helicopter which arrived to distribute food supplies in the Muzaffargarh district of Pakistan’s Punjab province August 7, 2010.”
I never got a chance to speak to the villagers in my image. Trapped in the belly of the chopper, I did not even know where we had descended. All I could confirm was that I had leaped onto a graveyard, where the winds from the propellers threw me from one dirt mound to another.
On July 30, 2011, nearly one year later, I found the village and my subjects.
Adrees as ever amazing pictures and a great story
Barefoot in a recycled school
The environment hasn’t been spared in India’s headlong rush towards development and consumerism. With it came mounds of garbage, piles of waste that had nowhere to go, industrial pollutants that were fed straight back into the rivers and lakes that supply drinking water to millions. Walking around the streets of any town in India, you don’t get the feeling that care for the environment is on the top of anyone’s list of priorities.
So it was with a little skepticism that I read about a school which claimed to be completely environmentally friendly. I made a plan to travel to Pune, about 190km (118 miles) from Mumbai, to take a look at the Aman Setu school, which means “bridge to peace”. They claimed fantastic things – the buildings were environmentally friendly made entirely out of recycled and natural bits and pieces – they had their own vegetable garden for children – kids were allowed to run around barefoot.
What I found really was surprising. The “school” consisted of just a handful of buildings. Madhavi Kapur, who came up with the idea for the school, told me how they’d made the buildings – they’d taken old cement bags, commonly left over at many construction sites after buildings are made in India, and compacted them together with mud to make the rooms. One of the buildings was cone-shaped, others rectangular. Roofs were made out of old advertisement claddings. Ventilation was provided through disused plastic pipes. Instead of using toxic paints and whitewashes, they used a mixture of cow dung, mud and water. I was told it’s been traditionally used in India for centuries because strangely enough, a mixture of cow dung and water insect proofs buildings. Who would have thought?!? It smelled reasonably pleasant too, you wouldn’t think you were standing somewhere were the floors and walls were plastered in cow dung.
There were rough windows cut into the walls. No lights or fans, just natural light streaming into the rooms, the sound of wind rustling the trees outside. The children seemed to love it. Why wouldn’t they? The classrooms were rustic but nice. If they got bored of studying maths or whatever, they could just leave the class, run around in the grass for a while, feed fish in the local pond, or do whatever they want and then come back in. A teacher told us they wanted the kids “to be one with the surroundings” to give them a sense of responsibility, and also to release energy – when they do come back to studying multiplication tables, they’re docile.
They’d thought of everything – they bought an old municipal transport bus and stripped it down to make it kid safe. They installed a blackboard and it doubles as a classroom and a play space, where the boys can go and dangle from the handlebars on the roof.
The children get to run around barefoot on the grass anytime they want, play in a garden on recycled car tires, hang out by a pond – all with no teachers screaming at anyone. Surprisingly, the children are attentive and obedient in class, and for all of the running around, it’s got to be the quietest school yard I’ve been in. There’s no bells to announce classes, just the teacher saying “we’re done for now”.
Nice pix Vivek! Always liked happy stories as opposed to disaster ones! Keep up the good work!
Paradise city in grizzly bear country
“Take me down to the paradise city where the grass is green and the girls are pretty. Take me home. Oh, won’t you please take me home.”
Apparently those few lyrics from the Guns ‘N Roses 1987 hit song Paradise City are the only parts of the song I know and also the only song I know the lyrics to. I can’t even recite the Star Spangled Banner. But singing in a false seagull strangling soprano while hiking and camping in grizzly bear country was my way of not creeping up on a bear and surprising it and thus becoming bear food.
However, there was no amount of preparation I could have done that wasn’t immune from my own self-inflicted anguish and anxiety. Learn from my failure: when camping by yourself in bear country never ever ever ever read a book about grizzly bear attacks while you’re trying to go to sleep in your sleeping bag. Sleep just doesn’t happen with that running through your mind and every little sound in the forest is sure to be a grizzly bear on its way to attack you. And for God sakes, skip over the parts about the bear’s mating habits.
Last week I spent a whole week camping by myself in Yellowstone National Park doing a story about the environment of the park. Seriously, how cool of an assignment is that? Growing up in the west and having a Dad that loved the outdoors, I had been to the park many times. But this was an opportunity to travel the park by myself. That meant being able to get up before the crack of dawn and staying out late well past the end of the good light to get the shots I wanted and not having to worry about inconveniencing others. But it also meant a lot of time to think about what a bear would smell like up close and what I would do if in the middle of the night I found myself confronted by one. “Would the bear eat my arms first? Wait, I read they disembowel their victims to get to the good stuff. Does bear spray really work?”
Riches above, wealth below
I’ve visited different parts of Ecuador’s Amazon jungle many times both as a photographer and as a tourist. I even covered a border war there and always found the jungle to be beautiful, in all situations. But nothing ever impressed me as much as a recent tour of the Yasuni National Park, home of the Waorani people and arguably one of the most biologically diverse places on Earth.
Apart from containing more species of trees than in all of North America, the Yasuni also contains some 20 percent of Ecuador’s oil reserves. For that reason it is also the focus of a novel initiative that the current government has launched to the world: In exchange for not drilling for crude in a 200,000-hectare area of Yasuni National Park, the government is asking wealthy nations, foundations and individuals to give it $3.6 billion. The proposal to the international community is to replace some of the income that Ecuador will not receive by keeping the petroleum underground, and prevent the contamination that comes from exploration, production, and consumption.
They’ve given potential partners until 2024 to pay up, or watch the Yasuni’s oil being exploited. Last September, Chile became the first contributor with $100,000. There are other offers from France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Norway.
Just to reach Tiputini I had to take a 40-minute flight to Coca, travel two hours by boat to Pompeya, 90 minutes by bus to the Tiputini River, and then another four hour boat ride to the Tiputini Biodiversity Station.
An erupting volcano on the horizon
It was Saturday, May 21, and I was returning from a tour with nine friends. We had spent 15 hours climbing a 1420 metre (yard) high peak named Midfellstindur near Iceland’s Skaftafell national park. While driving back along route 1 from Skaftafell towards our hotel, the organizer of the trip Hans Kristjansson said “This is a strange cloud just above the glacier”.
As a hang glider and ultralight pilot I knew right away that this was no ordinary cloud and said to Hans: “My friend, this is not a ordinary cloud but the start of an eruption”. We stopped the car and I tried to use well the last seven frames that I had on my memory card in my Canon D300 DSLR camera. I took seven frames in about 20 minutes. I always take my photos in RAW format to be able to post-process them. It paid off this time. The pictures were taken at N 63° 56.712 W 17° 23.729.
When I got back to the hotel I was unable to view my pictures as my laptop was at home in Reykjavik along with my card reader. The lesson of the trip is that I will never ever travel again without my MacBookPro and my Lexar card reader. And I will make sure that I have ample space on different memory cards!
So wait, you’re a stringer at Reuters?
Lucas
http://www.pictobank.com
In the hunt for Malaysia’s endangered wild elephants
Trekking deep in Malaysia’s dense rainforest, a group of wildlife rangers went on a risky mission to locate and capture wild elephants in a bid to preserve the endangered species that are fast dwindling due to the loss of their natural habitat.
I recently joined in the mission of official “elephant hunters” — a 10-day ordeal that took us to the forested land in the southern part of Peninsular Malaysia — and ended up with a wild elephant after missing another.
Rapid clearing of forests to pave the way for oil palm estates have taken a toll on the elephant population in Malaysia’s southern state of Johor. Forest clearance ignored the need for elephant corridors to allow for transmigration and this has given rise to a considerable human-elephant conflict. Elephants have no choice but to destroy the farmers’ valuable crops.
The Elephant Management Unit, set up in 1974 by Malaysia’s Department of Wildlife and National Parks, is operating the world renowned Kuala Gandah Elephant Conservation Centre to protect the captured animals. The unit has become highly specialized in elephant translocation, moving elephants to the eastern states where there is still a large amount of forest. More than 600 elephants have been translocated in 37 years. This policy appears to have been successful in maintaining a healthy elephant population and reducing human-elephant conflict.
Great news and photo coverage as always. More exposures to the public of these kind of activities need to be done to ensure the protection and care given to these protected fauna and flora. Great work there!!!
A global view of Earth Hour
The world turned off its lights on March 26 for an hour from 8.30 p.m. local time as a show of support for tougher action to confront climate change.
A global celebration of Earth Hour 2011 from Nicky Loh on Vimeo.
I was given the assignment to not only photograph the event from Taipei, Taiwan, but to produce a multimedia video that showcased the world’s landmarks without lights as part of the fifth annual Earth Hour.
The Reuters online team in Toronto and I had decided to produce a video to illustrate the event with pictures by our photographers around the world. The idea was to fade before pictures with the lights turned on into the exact same image without the lights on.
The effects, or impacts, of climate change may be physical, ecological, social or economic. Evidence of observed climate change includes the instrumental temperature record, rising sea levels, and decreased snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere.Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in concentration. It is predicted that future climate changes will include further global warming.
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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.