PHOTO SOAPBOX

Ghana

2012-01-31T16:25:00.000-08:00

I've just had the unique opportunity to spend a short time staying with a family in a rural village in upper eastern Ghana for a story reporting on the work of Anglo/Ghanaian charity Afrikids . Myself and feature writer Bryony Gordon spent two days and nights with Alfred Yoroyire and his extended family in the village of Manyoro, 5 kms from the border with Burkina Faso .

Afrikids was one of the Daily Telegraph's Christmas charities and each year the charity runs the Afrikids Experience Challenge where people are placed with rural families in northern Ghana to give them an insight into the daily struggles that families face and ultimately an opportunity to help bring change with their own expertise and experience .

Alfred is one of the lucky few who has some land to grow crops and a small chemist shop to support his family. Although their lifestyle compared to us in the west is incredibly basic they still are in the more fortunate minority, levels of poverty in the Bolgatanga municipality and across Ghana are incredibly high with many families struggling to support themselves without the help of NGO's and charities as their own government appears to struggle to provide much help beyond the most basic infrastructure . The gulf between rich and poor in Ghana is simply astounding , like in so many "developing nations".

I was deeply touched by the Yoroyire family's kindness and generosity during our brief stay and of the work of Afrikids. I've been fortunate enough over the years to have travelled to many countries and have witnessed much along the way, but occasionally I'm still struck by how those who have so little material wealth have hearts that are so generous they can put us all to shame.

A gallery of my images from Ghana can be viewed here

Remembering 911

2011-09-10T03:47:00.000-07:00

Tripoli 10 September 2011

The burning twintowers are an image that has been indelibly etched on to my memory forlife. I was in New York that fateful September on assignment covering NewYork Fashion Week and on the evening of the 10^th I could never haveimagined in my wildest dreams how the lives of so many would be irreparablychanged for life.
As I made my way down to the scene New Yorkers on WestBroadway sat on the roofs of cars sipping coffees and watching the smoke risefrom the towers after the initial impacts, some with binoculars. But the calmwas soon broken as panic took over when the towers collapsed one after theother sending billowing clouds of dust and debris across the financial districtof downtown Manhattan. As others fled I fought my way through to where thefirefighters were that had survived the towers collapse. The scene of destructionwas nothing like I had ever witnessed before, firemen struggled with fightingthe burning debris from partially crushed fire Engines amidst great shards ofsteel and concrete, all that remained of the World Trade Centre complex. Otherssat in shock, exhausted, silent and motionless, the immensity and tragedy ofthe morning’s events had simply overwhelmed them. I walked out of ground zerocaked in a caustic dust which burnt my uncovered skin struggling tocomprehend what I had just witnessed . I was discovered by a colleaguewho managed to flag down a car who's driver kindly took me back to my midtown hotel where Iwas able to file my images back to London. The first words from my photo editorat the time Bob Bodman, were “thank god you are still alive”.

Over the coming daysthe strength and resilience of New Yorkers was undeniable as they fought fearand confusion to get the embattled city working again with most of downtownManhattan's streets still closed to traffic and acrid smoke and dust clouds still rising from groundzero. The raw emotions of fear, shock and grief were slowly replaced with thatof stubborn patriotism, perseverance and a community united. But there werealso heartbreaking scenes as relatives of the missing posted photo flyers onthe walls around the New York Armoury on Lexington Avenue, which as the dayswent by became shrines to the victims of America's most devastating terrorattack.

Since that Septembermorning I have gone over again and again in my head the events that have notonly profoundly effected the lives of thousands across the globe but my owncareer and personal life too. Bearing witness to the attacks made me feel moreakin to the inhabitants of New York than my own city, I felt I could identifywith them far better than I could with my friends back in London, especiallywhen it came to what I felt should happen next. Retaliation seemed a perfectlyreasonable response at the time.

On the firstanniversary of the attacks I went through my images again properly for thefirst time, tears welled up in my eyes as I flicked through the image files onmy computer, there were obviously still emotions I had yet to come to termswith. To this day what happened that morning, still doesn’t seem real,more like working on a Jerry Bruckheimer movie set. I never saw a single body in the debris, it was if theysimply disintegrated along with one of America’s greatest landmarks. Only thefaces and emotions of the living immediately around me made me realise thestark reality of the situation. As I made my way to the burning twin towersthat morning on foot a young woman approached me asking if I had a mobile phonethat worked as her father worked in one of the towers and she couldn't get in contact. I explained that Ididn’t have a working US mobile, she thanked me and carried on but remarked asshe left “I hope you get your pictures”. I will never know if her father wasone of the fortunate ones that made it to safety.

I have never oncehad to question the reality of what was to come next. In the 10 years since 911I have documented the fallout in Afghanistan and Iraq, what is known in the West as the “War onTerror". The months at a time I havespent abroad in the Middle East and Central Asia amount to several years whenadded together. The images I have had published during this period have done little tocontribute to the understanding of a somewhat misguided and poorly prosecuted war. Images that did such as those that were to come out of Abu Ghraib prison, taken by the sadistic guards themselves more than likely prolonged the suffering, but also rightly illustrated our own duplicity. Although I didn’tstruggle with the morality of the initial campaign in Afghanistan I had deep reservationsabout the invasion of Iraq and it’s relevance to the war against Al Qaeda. Bothstarted in lightning fast, largely successful military campaigns and thenslowly descended into terrible quagmires, resulting in the death and maimingof 1000's of western soldiers and tens of thousands of innocent civilians. Iraq may now be on the slow road torecovery after years of unforgivable suffering since the fall of Saddam Husseinbut Afghanistan is still in a state turmoil , with a political solution still waybeyond reach. Osama Bin Laden may now be dead but there is still no end in sightto the threat of Islamic extremism.

More images can be seen in my Photoshelter archive below
http://heathcliffomalley.photoshelter.com/gallery/911-and-the-War-on-Terror/G0000KXxDHwvIYeM/

Photographing the Royal Wedding

2011-05-05T02:50:00.000-07:00

On Friday morning I found myself taking part in a small slice of history and after weeks of anticipation I arrived in Westminster just before the sun rose and slowly made my from the car laden with equipment to my position for the big day. Even at such an early time in the morning there were already large crowds of excited members of the public gathered curb-side behind barriers, some of whom had been camped out for days. Fortunately for me everything had been prearranged by ballot so I already had a spot marked on the Crimean Memorial directly opposite the West Gate of the Abbey and didn't have the stress of the "first come first serve"situation that other photographers did in other positions .

This didn't stop myself and others finding other things to worry about though and from 6am until the first arrivals at around 10.30am the discussion instead focused on where the Royal Couple would kiss for the first time, would the mobile networks work , which focal length , iso and f stop to use and of course who was going to get the coffees! There was also the question of remotes, some of the agency photographers had a number of cameras on remote, the majority opting for a wide and a telephoto zoom such as the 70-200 2.8. With only 3 SLR cameras; a 5D MkII and two 1D MkIv's, I couldn't possibly do the same so opted for just one remote using a 5DMKII and 16-35 mounted on a Manfrotto Magic Arm triggered using Pocketwizard Plus II's, but on the U.S bandwidth which meant they wouldn't be interfered with too much by other photographers remotes. In retrospect this was probably a mistake and perhaps should've shot tighter on perhaps a 50 or 70 but at the time I was happy to have anything up at all ! After some deliberation with other photographers about where the Royal newlyweds might stop to pose I opted to use the Canon 400 2.8L as my main lens and the 70-200 2.8 L with the fantastic new 1.4 MkIII extender (both courtesy of Frankie Jim at Canon UK) as my looser lens both mounted on a MkIV's.

From our position we could catch all the Royal and Foreign dignitary arrivals but occasionally we could hear loud cheers as some of the more popular guests such as the Beckhams arrived at the other gate, we of course could see nothing except for some of the photographers on the opposite stand focusing their long lenses in the direction of the crowd noise. Finally the focus of all out attentions began to arrive, first of all a slightly nervous looking Prince William and his brother Harry and then finally Kate Middleton who looked absolutely stunning and her father Michael, who's top hat tumbled out onto the road as his door was opened.

Before the event there had been lots of talk about mobile bandwidths being restricted and the possibility of not being able to wire our images back to our publications and some had opted for incredibly expensive internet cables lines . As I sent the first arrival shots whilst the wedding ceremony took place in fact although the 3g networks were working fine and the option of walking back to the office in Victoria afterwards with all my kit to upload there was now finally laid to rest !

In the end the shots of William and Kate leaving the the Abbey after tying the knot worked out really well and although I shot on RAW I'd got my exposures pretty much bang on by compensating for the dark background of the Abbey interior. Somehow I also managed to get both William and Kate looking directly at me, almost impossible in even a controlled environment and the next day the image was used down the whole page of the Daily Telegraph's souvenir pullout, I may not have got the kiss but it was a pretty good result !

Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington in Memoriam

2011-04-22T18:30:00.000-07:00

On wednesday 20th April the devastating news that two of the world's leading photojournalists Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros had been killed in Misrata came out via Twitter and other social media networks, before finally making it to the mainstream news later in the evening. They were returning to relative safety from the frontline of Tripoli street in the besieged city of Misrata with a number of other photographers when they were both mortally wounded by shrapnel from either an exploding mortar or RPG round. Two other photographers Guy Martin and Michael Christopher Brown were also injured in the attack, Martin seriously. The news has hit the journalism community hard with many of my colleagues including myself, struggling to come to terms with their deaths, and my thoughts and heartfelt condolences are with their families and partners.

I knew both Tim and Chris, though we were not close. Tim and I travelled into Benghazi together from Tobruk during his first foray into Libya for Vanity Fair in late March and I bumped into Chris in the hotel lobby on his arrival in Benghazi and had a quick chat for the first time in a number of years and told him how dangerous I thought it was and to be careful during his stay, the next morning I left Libya for home. There is a kind of bond between people that witness the more extreme aspects of the world we live in which is hard to explain, and although our paths may not cross that regularly there is always a sense of kinship between fellow travellers that never goes away.

Tim and Chris were incredible talented and compassionate photographers, their craft admired by so many people across the globe, and anyone who has seen the documentary Restrepo could testify to Tim's incredible talent as a film maker too. In fact when our paths first crossed I couldn't help myself but say how much I admired his work, had watched his film and bought his incredible book Infidel. He cracked a joke thanking me for adding some extra change to his coffers and we carried on our journey to Benghazi chatting about our work and experiences over the years. Tim was humble, charming and like Chris incredibly brave, risking his life to highlight the plight of others in countries many people at home have barely heard of or at least never travelled to. If Chris Hondros' last published photographs from Misurata are anything to go by it is understandable why they were both willing to put themselves in the line of fire to get the story. Misrata has been under siege by Gaddafi's forces for many weeks now as one of the first cities to rise against the dictator, and some parts of the town have been reduced to rubble and possibly more than 1000 civilians have died, their only crime to have wanted to take the path towards democracy. Tim's last Twitter update read " In besieged Libyan city of Misrata. Indiscriminate shelling by Qaddafi forces. No sign of NATO."

All those that choose to report from war zones are fully aware of the risks that sometimes have to be taken to illustrate the sheer inexcusable brutality of conflict and inevitable human suffering, sadly this time it claimed the lives of two of photojournalism's leading lights and they will be missed by so many forever.

Covering the conflict in Libya

2011-04-19T16:49:00.000-07:00

I recently returned from an assignment covering the war in Libya, which was a dramatic change from recent years where I have only had the chance to cover conflicts “embedded” with the western military in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It had been a long time since I’d had to employ fixers to take me to the frontline, if there was such a thing as a frontline , and filed my stories from the roof of the car or back at our Hotel instead of a military base . In Libya there was no waiting for the stamp of approval from a British military Unit Press Officer who would check my images for “OPSEC” before being allowed to send my pictures to the paper or ground rules about how to cover the story. Instead myself and the reporter Ben Farmer worked unhindered by the yoke of bureaucracy and used old fashioned reporting skills from our collective years of experience and gut instinct to find our way.

These rediscovered freedoms also unleashed the nearly forgotten dangers of covering such a conflict. At one point we were having to drive for up to four hours from Benghazi to where the Rebel forces gathered on the coastal highway heading towards Gaddafi’s hometown of Sert. Without the advantage of sophisticated communications equipment the only way to find out where the frontline was on a particular day was to edge our way up the highway ( often at 160kms per hour) and stop occasionally to check with rebel fighters whenever we found a group gathered by their pickup trucks, more often than not scrounging for fuel or ammunition This information was of course not always reliable and we would always keep our eyes peeled for other journalists along the way who were often a better source of information. On one occasion we arrived in the town of Bin Jawwad which had only recently fallen back into the hands of the Rebels and the only thing stopping us from driving past rebel lines and into the clutches of Gaddafi’s troops or a hail of 50cal gunfire was our wish to stop and chat with some journalist friends we recognised . Shortly after the whistling of incoming rounds over our heads became the signal for a mass retreat of hundreds of rebel vehicles back in the direction of Benghazi.

Perhaps I’d become somewhat institutionalised by my years of embeds where the greatest threat are invisible IED’S and occasional small arms fire whilst on patrol in dense agricultural land, not sporadic barrages of artillery fire along an open desert road with very little cover and the inevitable and infectious panic of a rag tag rebel force in full high speed retreat that always followed.

It’s for this reason I think that I found covering the conflict in Libya quite intimidating and almost frightening at times. Having no faith in the fighting force you’re with is disconcerting to say the least and to get any real action on a human level that didn’t consist of men lobbing explosive ordnance at one another from a distance of 20kms meant travelling into a kind no mans land where your only cover was the car you came in and if your were lucky perhaps a slight berm of coarse rock strewn sand, factors that I for one found very off putting . This same sand did seem to “dull” the impact of artillery shells though by absorbing much of their force and fortunately the majority tended to fall either side of the highway.

Others it has to be said were braver than myself, possibly for some because they don't as of yet have children like myself, including some of the younger generation of twenty-something photojournalists that have recently arrived on the scene, many of whom are incredibly talented and driven . For many years I’ve been in awe of the Nachtwey, Delahayes and Kozyrevs of the photojournalism world , but there are in fact too many names to mention amongst the list of my contemporaries who are immensely talented and experienced war photographers , some of whom I count as good friends. Soon I am in no doubt there will be many more names to add who are currently in Libya to that list who have come of age in the digital, social networking era who have already begun gracing the pages of some of the more credible publications across the Atlantic and in Europe that still use photography well.

As time went on, just as it had when Rommel and Montgomery were fighting on this same road, fuel also started to become hard to come by. Luckily we found out about a warehouse full of metal jerricans in an abandoned Libyan army base which we filled up with fuel before setting off each day and kept in the boot of our driver’s Chevrolet with our flak jackets. On the road to the “front” we would pass petrol stations with queues of Libyans attempting to fill their tanks by lowering plastic water bottles into opened underground fuel tanks as the pumps had either been sabotaged by the retreating Libyan army or were disabled due to powercuts. There were so many “tourists“ coming up the road each day from Benghazi, often with their kids in tow still euphoric from the recent revolution that they themselves became a strain on logistics and it wasn’t until early April when the Rebels began losing the gains they had made due to the NATO airstrikes and the euphoria subsided that this began to be less of a problem. On one day we found ourselves in an oil refinery trying to scrounge fuel amongst a scene of utter chaos but gave up when we realised quite how many hours we were losing on a fast moving story.

My weeks on the road in eastern Libya were so many thing; challenging, upsetting, sometimes daunting, often frustrating as well as exhilarating and most definitely exhausting.

To bear witness to a small slice of the revolution against Gaddafi was an experience that I shall always remember and may perhaps return to before it's conclusion. There was something quite endearing about the people of Benghazi who welcomed us western journalists with open arms. There was little evidence on the ground of the alleged Al Quaeda elements in their midsts , even though I’m sure there must be the odd Jihadi amongst them., but so what ? The majority, the plumbers, school teachers and university students who’ve taken up arms in their inexperienced and often frighteningly inept hands were incredibly brave to do so and although I do wish them success in achieving democracy and freedom from Gaddafi’s tyranny I do worry at what cost in human suffering.

Fuji X100 first impressions review

2011-03-20T16:26:00.000-07:00

105th @ F8, 800 ISO. Focus preset at 3m

I've owned the new Fuji Finepix X100 for about a week now and think I have a pretty good idea of how it performs and thought it was about time to post my first impressions. I'm no camera reviewer so I won't be posting performance graphs and crops displaying sharpness comparisons and artifacts (what are they again ?) but will purely describe in simple terms how the camera has handled now that I'm used to it and how happy I am with it's handling and image quality .
The kind people downstairs in the pro department at Jacobs Digital in New Oxford Street had one on pre order for me since the camera was announced at Photokina and when it arrived I shot a series of quick tests before parting with any cash.
I was instantly surprised at how good it was shooting at high iso, 3200 looked great and 6400 is more than usable . After a few tests in the shop at high film speeds I moved outdoors and checked the shutter lag and autofocus. Shooting with the Fuji X100 was pretty straightforward and the camera felt responsive enough, with relatively quick autofocus and minimal shutter lag. I then switched over to manual focus flicking the switch on the side of the camera and using the rear dial to adjust the distance to 3 meters and set the aperture ring to F8 . Immediately the camera came into it's own and I snapped away without anyone taking any real notice, the image above of a canoodling couple on new Oxford Street was shot then, apparently completely oblivious to my presence.

The viewfinder is a joy to use, for years I've felt unimpressed with the lack of built-in viewfinders on higher end compacts and it makes such a difference to the way I shoot, the optical viewfinder is fantastic displaying the necessary information one needs such as aperture, shutter speed, iso and an exposure scale. With the simple flick of a lever you can switch to EVF mode which was surprisingly pleasant enough to use , and having the added advantage of displaying the sharpness of the image before capture. You can even have a quick review of the image after capture in the viewfinder which is great to check exposure etc but can be somewhat distracting.The digital overlay of horizon and grid I do find a bit to busy for my liking, keep it simple. Having an aperture ring on the lens and shutter speed/exposure top dials on top of the camera make adjustments a cinch whilst on the move and really make you feel "in charge" when shooting, unlike a regular "pro"compact .

60th @ F4, 1600 ISO

A few days later I used the camera at Crufts, my first time there ever and slightly bewildering, but in the astonishingly poor mixed lighting the Fuji X100 performed well again and I filed images to the newspaper shot at 1600 iso without a moments hesitation .

The light meter and white balance are both accurate enough, the images shot with the X100 do still have the "feel"of a compact as opposed to an SLR though. I can't really put it better than that but the files certainly don't have the creaminess say of the 5D MkII . Once in Photoshop though with minimum tweaking the files definitely improve.

240th @ F2, 400 ISO

Now it's not all a bed of roses, the buffer is poor when shooting at 3/5 fps and has put me off using it in high speed mode unless absolutely necessary.
Focusing in low contrast and backlit conditions at around 1meter from the subject can sometimes be a problem also but strangely switching from optical finder to EVF seems to remedy this most of the time.
This could be to do with the fact that the minimum focus distance with the optical finder is 80cm(not far off a Leica M9 digital rangefinder) whilst with the EVF 35cm, so watch your distances !
The control dial on the back is also very fiddly and switching over to macro mode, changing iso and other menu options can sometimes be frustrating . There are however some shortcut buttons on the camera that can help with some of these issues.
Battery life isn't fantastic either, after a days shooting you will definitely need to recharge, in this day and age with new battery technology and at this price point I expected better.

125th @ F2.5, 200 ISO

In conclusion, I really like this camera, it has it's bugs, the fiddly menu dial and buffer speed, but nothing so serious that I regret in any way buying the thing. The camera looks and feels great with it's retro styling and weighty magnesium body, it's a joy to use. The hybrid viewfinder, sharp lens, excellent file quality and high iso are fantastic for a camera of this size and I only hope that Fuji don't release a version in black in the near future as that would really be annoying !

14th @ F4, 800 ISO

London Fashion Week

2011-03-15T16:25:00.000-07:00

London Fashion Week has been and gone once again until later in the year and along with the daily slog of shooting the straight up and down catwalk images for the newspaper I also managed to have a bit of fun along the way seeing old friends and soaking up the general atmosphere of a world so completely different to any other.

Up until a few years ago I used to cover the majority of the shows in Milan, Paris, London and occasionally New York for over a decade, but with the recession and budget cuts at the British newspapers this has now come to an end for the Fleet Street contingent of catwalk photographers.

The catwalk shows hold a special place in my heart as it was where my photography career started off as an assistant to Chris Moore the man behind catwalking.com . I learnt my trade with the original Canon Eos 1's, at the time unbeatable for it's fast autofocus, shooting on bulk loaded Kodak EPT 160 transparency film before moving over to Fleet St and national newspapers. It was a fantastic time and incredibly hard work , often 16 hour days for weeks at a time, 5am marking up spots with gaffer tape, shooting solo or as a second to Chris on "House shows" for the designer and spending my evenings bulk loading more film from 100 meter cans for for the next days shows, up to 12 shows a day.

Balenciaga, Paris 2007

Although, contrary to popular belief there IS a skill to photographing catwalk well, watching the light and shape of the garments as the model swings her hips from side to side down the runway and adjusting exposure along the way. The No1 factor though in great photos is a great spot, the 1'x2' foot rectangle drawn with gaffer tape with your name on it makes all the difference to good catwalk images, and to get a good spot means getting on with the rest of the pack. Literally rubbing shoulders with the same group of photographers for a month at a time twice a year, plus the menswear and couture shows for the really hardcore makes the pack a very tight bunch, and "tourists" as strangers and part timers are referred to (like I now am) can struggle to get those prime positions .

Hussein Chalayan, Paris 2007

Kidman and Lagerfeld, Chanel, Paris 2004

Photographically though catwalk photography is not particularly rewarding and I've always tried to nip backstage between shows if I have the time to shoot something a bit different and this year on a show I didn't need to cover for my fashion editor I tried out a Cokin starburst filter from the other end of the runway to catch the model walking back with the bank of lights in the background. Although there was a bit of flare to deal with the image below worked really well for me along with a handful of others.

Bora Aksu, London 2011

In the past I've also shot a few frames on my medium format cameras, a Fuji GS645 and Rolleiflex 3.5F,

both beautiful cameras which really make you think carefully before you shoot, which in these days of shooting digital is actually great for the photographic side of the brain to take a step back occasionally and get back to basics.

Matthew Williamson, London 2010

Catwalk photographers, London 2010

here's looking forward to the next season of shows .....

Lighting For A Promo Shoot

2011-02-17T07:44:00.000-08:00

Last week I shot some photographs for a national newspaper client who were doing a readers promotion with beauty products retailer The Bodyshop . I do a fair amount of portrait work these days but not much under studio conditions and I thought this would make a good blog posting on lighting for those who like me not too long ago, find lighting rather intimidating, as the setup was very simple and easy to replicate

using only a couple of lights and a bounce card. It is often easy to overcomplicate lighting and working as I do predominantly without an assistant as newspaper budgets are relatively small keeping it simple helps to keep you focused on the job in hand. No one wants to be running back and forth moving lights around and adjusting f stops when you only have a short amount of time to get the job done !

For this shot I used two Elinchrom 400W heads both on low power ; one camera left at 45 degrees with a 1 meter Rotalux softbox no more than a metre from the model to help softly wrap the light around the subjects face, a bounce card on a Lastolite stand close to the models right for fill and the other 400W head illuminating the background with a wide angle reflector. Another option would have been to place the main light directly in front of the model slightly higher at 45 degrees and a large reflector underneath, which is a classic "clamshell "beauty setup, but the the one used seemed to work fine with the white backdrop bouncing just enough light back up off the floor.

There is another Elinchrom head camera right which can be seen in the photo above, but ignore this as it is left over from a previous full length shoot . The flash heads were triggered using Pocketwizards (which have never yet let me down) and shot using the fantastic Canon 1D MkIV with a 70-200 2.8L lens,
160 iso, 160th @ F8.
Here's a lighting diagram courtesy of the excellent www.lightingdiagrams.com to give you a clearer illustration of the set up.

I did two shots like this with two different models, a blonde and a brunette, one for the Daily Telegraph's front page puff and another for the Sunday edition .

I'll be starting on London Fashion Week tomorrow so hopefully I'll find some inspiration there for another posting soon and I'm planning another about lighting food sometime in the near future.

Fuji X100 release date and pricing announced

2011-02-08T14:58:00.000-08:00

Finally the moment a lot of us have been waiting for, the release date and price-point for the Fuji X100 pro spec-compact camera have been announced. I've been pretty excited by this camera since it was unveiled at Photokina in September 2010 and on paper it looks fantastic... 12.3 MP, up to 5 fps, 200-6400 ISO, RAW and Jpeg capability, a hybrid viewfinder, a fixed Fujinon 35mm(equivalent) F2 lens and a Magnesium alloy body, this could be the killer compact.

The camera should be on camera shop shelves in early March and the recommended retail price is £999 in the UK but it has already been suggested that many retailers will go for a £899 price point although I have already noticed a few online retailers advertising the camera for pre-order at £1020. Considering the price of a Leica X1 being around £1400 and the M9 £4850

the Fuji X100 sounds incredible value. The only hitch is that as of yet, no one has had a proper look at it, so hopefully soon we'll see the likes of dpreview and the print media publishing in depth reviews and high res samples of the files it can actually shoot.

Focus speed, Shutter lag, Image processing time, quality and ISO performance are all questions that have to be answered before parting with any cash of course but I'm fairly confident Fuji will deliver, I mean it's about time someone brought a out a truly decent high end digital compact with a viewfinder !

It's very reminiscent in it's essence to one of my all time favourite cameras, the Konica Hexar AF,

a fantastic street camera, which I still own and occasionally take out of it's box to shoot a few rolls of Neopan through. If the Fuji X100 comes anywhere to close to the experience of the Hexar in digital form, I for one will be incredibly happy .... oh yeah and before I forget, how about doing it in black as well as silver ?

Archiving Your Photo Library

2011-02-07T04:13:00.000-08:00

Over the years I have saved my digital and analogue images to so many different types of media . First there were sleeves and zip discs for film and then CD's/DVD's and as files sizes from digital images have now increased tenfold, in recent years external Hard Drives . I've always used Lacie D2 drives, not because they are necessarily the best, but they have always worked for me, I can "daisy chain" them together with firewire cables and so far have never failed.
The thing is it came to the stage in 2010 where I had my archive spread over this whole range of media and it was taking ages to locate images for clients and any presentation I was making. I had been reading up a lot about the various types of media storage now available, and there are plenty including optical discs, Drobos and RAID systems but eventually I decided to go with a pair of larger 2TB versions of the LACIE drives I had been using over the last 5 years or so .

The reasoning behind this was that I still find large RAID systems prohibitively expensive, needing an initial minimum outlay of £1000.00 to set up whilst with smaller non RAID media I can for now, stagger my costs.
I had been following George Jardine's excellent articles in the U.S published Digital Photo Pro magazine which also raised other issues I had with my archive including how I named my files .
Over a month or so I transferred the last decade of images shot since I moved to digital in 1999 during the Kosovan war over to a 2 TerraByte drive and then went about the arduous process of renaming all the folders into reverse date format, sometimes followed by the job name if needed. Therefore the portrait shoot of Tory Peer Nigel Lawson I made last month changed from my old date format of "27/1/11 Lawson" to "20110127 Lawson" which then sorts all of my folders into chronological order on the drive index.

Once that process was completed I then duplicated the photo library onto another identical drive, re-boxed it and stored it safely, hopefully never to be touched until my everyday working drive fails. Labelling my everyday drives underneath with masking tape makes identifying a particular archive a breeze.
My current archiving workflow is of course not fool proof and although I managed to squeeze an entire decade onto 2TB's, now that I consistently shoot RAW and use Canon cameras with a far higher resolution than my original Canon/Kodak DCS 2MP cameras, a years worth of images is taking up that same 2TB of space !
This system, although taking up a lot of storage space is however enabling me now to locate images with ease and has the added bonus of giving me the opportunity to look at, reassess and enjoy images I haven't seen in years.....

TOP TEN WAYS TO PISS OFF A PHOTOGRAPHER

2011-02-06T06:56:00.000-08:00

Skimming through the excellent Photoshelter Blog the other day I came across a article entitled
"Top Ten Ways To Piss Off A Photographer " which made me chuckle, so many of the examples sounded familiar! It's been up a while now, I believe it was originally posted last summer but well worth a read.
Potential clients offering a photo credit as payment, simply pinching an image and using it without prior consent or attempting to rights grab an image in the small print of an agreement are occurrences I'm sure plenty of professional photographers have come across in their careers especially since the Industry has gone digital.

I signed up to Photoshelter recently as a way to have a website which doesn't just showcase my portfolio

but also acts as an archive with built in e-commerce and so far I'm extremely pleased with the results which you can see here, tell me what you think and make sure you check out the link above from the Photoshelter blog and see how familiar you are with the ten examples....

Shooting video with the Canon 5D MkII in Helmand

2010-07-22T11:13:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since my last post and a lot has happened. After being inspired by other photographers that had made the switch to video I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to the Canon Eos 5D MkII and after a bit of research got hold of a Zacuto Z-Finder with some help from Philip Bloom , and a hot shoe mounted Sennheiser mic. I had two embeds in Afghanistan in quick succession which gave me time to get used to shooting video along with the stills I needed to shoot for the newspaper, which without the Zacuto would have been impossible. When shooting stills with the same camera a shoulder mount was out of the question. All told it was a fascinating experience , and one I hope to continue.

Helmand 720p 5Dmk2 from Heathcliff O'Malley on Vimeo.

Incredibly the Photographers Year competition in the UK awarded me a highly commended in

the Multimedia category which was a real boost to my confidence ! This particular video was shot whilst with the Coldstream Guards(who were fantastic) in the Babaji district of Helmand province in December '09 and it has to be said I was helped greatly by the fantastic light that you get in Afghanistan at that time of year.....

Babaji is an area still fraught with danger, and like a lot of Helmand will take a long time to stabilise. Being mainly agricultural it's a much harder place to operate in than say Nad e Ali, which has the benefit of a reasonably sized town centre to secure and spread governance and influence from, if that is indeed what the locals wish for. I couldn't help but think that for all the tremendous effort and sacrifice being made by the young men there that most of the villagers just wanted to be left to go about the daily lives in peace without interference from a well intentioned ISAF or the Taliban, but that's just my opinion ....

The video and stills were predominantly shot using the Canon Eos 24-70 2.8L zoom which is a great lens to use on a full frame camera even without image stabilization, the Zacuto viewfinder

not only help me monitor the sharpness of the images I was shooting but was another point of contact with my body to help keep things steady.

I'd also invested in Blackhawk Tactical Cutaway body armour, which is incredibly light and comfortable but also more importantly tan in colour enabling me to blend in more to the surrounds, unlike the blue vest I used to wear which was becoming a liability on open ground, making me an easy target for Taliban snipers.....

Afghanistan video

2009-07-02T07:19:00.000-07:00

Over the last few years i've shot video alongside my stills whilst on assignment and have been wondering wether now is the time to invest in the new-ish Eos 5d MkII . On the more demanding of jobs, especially in hostile environments, carrying both stills and video equipment is a hinderance for me and the ability to shoot both video and stills in one unit appears to have great advantages. The only thing that has put me off going down this track so far is the simple fact that ergonomically the 5d mkII slr style body doesn't seem that suited to the task of shooting moving images and keeping the camera steady seems a tad tricky without using shoulder mounts and gyroscopic lenses. I recently stumbled upon a video made by Danfung Dennis whilst searching the web for quality 5d video in combat situations. I've admired his stills work from his coverage of the middle east over the last few years and this thoughtfully made piece of documentary video is proof that hard news can indeed be filmed with a DSLR
Check it out here .. http://www.danfungdennis.com

The handover of Basra

2009-06-17T07:32:00.000-07:00

The recent handover ceremony of Basra airbase in southern Iraq from British to U.S forces marking the end of six years of British military involvement in an unpopular war was in the end a muted affair. A deeply touching memorial service prior to the ceremony involved the reading of the names of all the 179 servicemen killed since the spring 2003 in front of a memorial wall, which left a lump in my throat especially so when one of the names mentioned last moments I had witnessed two years earlier in Basra palace.

To then see their sacrifice and surviving servicemen and women’s hard work reduced to the shaking of hands by two military commanders and the lowering of the 20^th Armoured brigade’s flag was difficult for me. How else I expected the British pullout to end is a debateable, it isn’t as if the Army could exactly hold a victory parade through the streets of Basra after leaving the city in a state of near anarchy two years earlier, unable to keep the peace ourselves , being both under manned and under resourced .

The British venture in southern Iraq will be scrutinised for many years to come, and many questions will be asked I’m sure about if we did the right thing or not, and wether the tactics used and resources placed at the military’s disposal by our Parliament were indeed adequate.

In briefings prior to the handover journalists were told that life has greatly improved for the inhabitants of Basra since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime, which may, with a small pinch of salt be true, but if so how much of this can be attributed to our involvement ? One could argue that if it wasn’t for the U.S change in counter insurgency tactics in Baghdad and their support of Prime minister Maliki’s “Charge of the Knights” campaign which finally brought relative peace and security to the streets of Basra in the spring of 2008 little would have changed and in fact life would be worse than it was under Saddam as it was in the bad years of 2004-2007.

I first came to Iraq in the autumn of 2002 after spending the last 12 months covering the 911 attacks on the twin towers in New York and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. Witnessing the futile attempts of the UN weapons inspectors in the final days of Saddam’s regime to avert a war , and the subsequent conflict which has ultimately cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians, some who happened to be friends of mine. The “War on Terror” had become somewhat personal to me and I felt that the conflict in Iraq at least, I had to see through to the end. Wether I now any longer have the energy and the will to fulfil that same sense of duty with the continuing conflict in Afghanistan is another matter.

Iraq before the war was a depressing country to be in , most of us journalists lived in the Al Rashid hotel in the presidential district of Baghdad, and were followed closely by rather inept mukhabarat secret police officers assigned to each reporting team. We’d fill most days either following the UN inspectors to mostly derelict former weapons sites and run down military bases across the breadth of Iraq and others at staged press junkets organised by the regime which often consisted of cynically staged political rallies, hospital visits to see young Leukemia sufferers (allegedly from the West’s use of depleted uranium in it’s missiles) and any self generated stories we could persuade the corrupt officials of the Information Ministry to let us cover.

In the evenings we would visit outdoor restaurants in the more affluent neighbourhoods or visit boozy parties in closing down Embassies and in colleagues hotel rooms fueled by cheap alcohol sold in Christian run liquor stores (cheap for a western journalists salary anyway. I once came across a group of Baghdad doctors who were splitting a bottle of Johnny Walker 3 ways with their monthly salaries)

Iraqi’s in Saddam’s Iraq, were on the whole deeply distrustful after years of strict authoritarian rule. One false word ran the risk of imprisonment, torture or even death, and I never found anyone , not even my late driver Salah, who would dare say a bad word about Saddam and his cronies. Economically life was tough too, sanctions and the regimes voracious appetite for personal enrichment had left the nation bankrupt, starving, and with a healthcare system once the envy of the Arab world now dilapidtated and short of essential medical equipment.

This was nothing compared to Iraq in the first years after the 2003 war however . Except for the pinning down of U.S forces in Nasiriyah the initial war in Iraq, as most of us know went relatively smoothly and ended within weeks. Over the coming months desperate searches were made for Saddam’s “Weapons of Mass Distruction” but none were found which certainly didn’t surprise myself and some others and made the more hawkish journalists begin to revaluate their entire view of the invasion in the months to come. This minor hiccup was easier for the politicians to reconcile, they simply moved the focus over to Regime Change from the original premise of disarming a potentially dangerous ally of Al Qaeda with weapons capable of striking the west within 30 minutes.

The relative peace and euphoria of liberation in Baghdad and the neighbouring cities however did not last long once there was nothing else to loot. Iranian backed religious and political figures began to rise out of ashes of decades of Shia oppression by the Baathist Sunni minority and began to fill the power vacuum where western troops unprepared for post war peacekeeping were held back, especially in Baghdad and Basra.

The lawlessness and open borders of the once brutal police state also attracted foreign fighters sympathetic to Osama bin Laden, finally fulfilling the neo-con prophecy of an Iraq infiltrated by Al Qaeda. Iraq, once the cradle of civilisation and the home of the garden of Eden was to become the killing grounds of the “war on terror” , and disenfranchised Baathists and wannabe terrorists from around the world descended on Iraq to fight the foreign Christian invader, queuing up on Syria’s border to martyr themselves in the name of Allah. In fact there were so many, it was reported, that Al Zarqarwi’s men had to turn many away at the border as waiting lists were so long.

Hostage taking became rife by late 2004 and the western soldiers and civilian victims kdnapped by Islamic extremists who gained publicity in the world’s press were the tip of the iceberg . Innocent Iraqi civilians were kidnapped by criminal gangs in the their thousands and returned for ransoms paid by desperate families already bankrupted by the ravages of war.

It was at this time that I felt the situation on the ground as a journalist had become too dangerous to operate any longer as a “Unilateral” and began to “Embed” instead with the military, an often frustrating and unrewarding method of working especially with the British, but safer nonetheless. It also gave me the opportunity to see the conflict from another point of view; that of the young western soldier, often in his late teens or early twenties, hoping to make a difference or help pay their way through college, or both.

I had previously seen the tragic consequences of a simple misunderstanding at a vehicle checkpoint that had led to the death of a family in a car peppered with NATO .556 rounds and to finally be on the other side of the wire provided an interesting insight into life as a peacekeeper in Iraq, and I developed a great sense of respect them.

Five years on I’m relieved that it appears to almost finally be over , that our troops are nearly all home, and that life in Iraq is now achieving some form of normality for the general populace. Wether the “trickle down effect” of the countries oil wealth will ever benefit the general populace remains to be seen but things now do finally seem to be moving in the right direction . History will be the final judge our venture .

Time To Leave Iraq ?

2008-12-16T15:13:00.000-08:00

Since late 2004 i have spent very little time on the streets of Iraq without either being escorted by the military or on an embed, which made made it incredibly difficult to see what the situation on the ground is really like, for normal Iraqi's. I mean isn't that the reason we were meant to be there in the first place, to give them a better future after toppling Saddams regime, trashing the infrastructure and not finding a single WMD ?

Yet little of what is reported in the media seems to be focused on the Iraqi's themselves, the focus is predominantly on our own troops and the sacrifices they are making every day, and i feel we've lost track of what really matters here. Now before you shoot me down there are fantastic reporters and photographers out there that are working on the ground, and as security improves i'm sure there will be more. I'm one of the cowards who hasn't yet made it back to working as we all did in the old days , staying in hotels without the security of the western military, and miss them sorely.

My last trip was indeed another embed, this time in southern Iraq, back to the centre of Basra, which only a year ago was deemed far too dangerous for the bulk of the British military to operate, resulting in their wholesale pull out to the airport.

If this wasn't humiliating enough, in the spring the Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki sent the Iraqi army into Basra with U.S advisors without even a courtesy call to the British, and after intense fighting and heavy losses cleared out most of the criminal gangs and Iranian funded militias from the city.

Although British trained Iraqi soldiers and their mentors did take part in the operation, their performance was relatively poor compared to that of the soldiers brought down from central Iraq mainly because they were understandably reluctant to fight in their own neighbourhoods.

Since then security in Basra has reported to have improved markedly but having heard this said before by British Army Press officers over the last few years it was only when i was allowed to drive into town in the back of an Iraqi army pick up truck with no body armour or a Brit escort that i began to finally believe them.

Although the statues of Iran-Iraq war veterans have now disapeared along the corniche and the old Sheraton Hotel is no more than an empty husk, i walked along the river front with my slightly nervous armed entourage and could finally see life returning to dare i say it, pre-war normality .The play parks were full of parents and their children, always a good sign, the street vendors were thriving and that evening the main shopping street was buzzing with activity. What a turnaround from last year.In fact the situation has improved enough for even our soldiers to return to the city in small numbers to continue training the Iraqi Police and Army, inconceivable a year ago. There is still a long way to go and many Iraqi's still don't feel that secure about there future but life does finally seem to be improving for them .

The surge in central Iraq masterminded by General Petreus appears to have paid off...so far. We'll have to wait and see what happens when the visibility of U.S troops on the streets of central Iraq decreases with the phased pull out over the next year to bases outside the cities.

If this succeeds, the goal of all western troops to be out of Iraq by 2011 could become a tangible reality... let's all keep our fingers crossed.

But what went wrong for the British in the south ? In the early days of the occupation it appeared as if they had the easier job in Basra and it's surrounds. They were dealing with a relatively welcoming Shia majority who saw them as liberators from Saddam's regime. On the other hand the Americans in Baghdad had what seemed to be a far more difficult job, Sunni extremist's, Foreign fighters and Secular tensions threatened to destroy any chance of a lasting peace in Iraq.

We often accused the U.S troops of being trigger happy and culturally insensitive, whilst they patrolled in full body armour and "eye pro", we went out in berets and smiles on our faces.

This wasn't entirely true and tended to suit the European view of Americans , fortunately i was able to work with U.S troops in the badlands of central Iraq and was on the whole impressed with only a few exceptions, including the handling of Falluja immediately after the invasion. On the other hand in Basra it was plain to see when unembedded that the British policy of a "softly softly" approach was allowing the militias and gangs to act with impunity. There has to be a balance when fighting an insurgency but did we get that balance right ? Perhaps we saved a lot of bloodshed with this policy, and one can argue that things seem to have worked out alright in the end, but quite possibly without much impact made by the British forces that were originally tasked with Basra's security. The Iraqi's in the end had to take matters into their own hands .

It's a terrible thing to say and i don't want to diminish in any way the sacrifice made by British troops who served in Iraq, they have done a fantastic job in incredibly difficulty circumstances, but i do feel that they were failed by the men leading them, be it their senior Commanding officers or the Politicians that decided to deploy our men to Iraq in the first place. Unlike the Americans we were never prepared to make the sort of commitment that was needed when it came to troop numbers to provide the security that Basra needed post war. Nor the skilled civilians that should have been provided by the FCO and Dfid to help the Iraqi's rebuild local government, it's institutions and infrastructure. Without these success was always going to be difficult. On the numerous trips i made over the years to visit british troops in the south i always came home with the impression that they were attempting to do a job , somewhat reluctantly, without the assets that were needed . This meant that the best the British forces could hope to achieve was to keep the status quo and prevent Basra from boiling over into complete anarchy .

Hopefully questions will be asked about our time in Iraq and the policies made that hampered our efforts while memories are still fresh and before history is rewritten . There are still lessons to be learnt from Iraq.

Austria's New Right

2008-10-06T07:21:00.000-07:00

I've just returned from Vienna, Austria to do a story about the resurgence of the far right in the country. As you may have heard, the two parties fronted by Hans Christian Strache and Jorg Haider managed to win 29 percent of the vote in the recent general elections. Unlike the far right of old, the New Right as i like to call them don't goose-step down the Strasse's in brown shirts and red armbands, but prefer to wear button down chambray shirts and chino's or sharp suits. No longer do they meet in beer hall cellars to plot their ascendance but now instead prefer trendy wine bars and youth disco's.

What i found difficult to figure out whilst i was out there on assignment was, why do 30 percent of white Austrians feel that life is so dreadful that they have to vote for the far right ? The streets are squeeky clean and relatively empty even in rush hour , the standard of living appears relatively high, there's a low crime rate and the immigrant population doesn'y exactly appear to be taking over !

I live in central London and know what a densely populated multicultural city with a large immigrant population looks like, and Vienna certainly isn't it. So Why, why why ? In this day and age i find it sickening that anyone could even contemplate voting for the likes of Strache or Haider. "Central Europeans are different" people say, is this true? Do the inhabitants of central Europe have a disposition towards Nazism, are the Germanic tribes inherently racist?

Apart from whinging about the number of Turks in their country, immigrants from the former Yugoslavia also had the finger pointed at them for putting a strain on Austria's resources. So except for the widespread xenophobia towards people originating from countries with an Islamic background that we witnessed, in fact anyone who isn't Austrian, whatever their complexion is to blame for the occasional crisp packet that is seen gently blowing down a Viennese street on a chill Autumn day, noisy neighbours that make you have to close your windows on a summers evening , waiting lists for social housing etc etc.

How dreadful for them! I remember as a child in Notting Hill having to close my bedroom window when the Spanish family down the road had their weekly, and rather nosiy family sunday lunch in the garden, or when the reggae sound system set up outside our home rehearsed early on a sunday morning for the Carnival. Did i wait with baited breath until i reached the age of 18 to run down to the nearest polling station and vote for the NF or BNP? No of course not, because in Britain i like to think that we tolerate other cultures and sometimes even embrace them.

What is worrying me though, with the credit crunch becoming more serious as the days go by and it's spread across the globe, and the long term fight against Islamic fundamentalism, could this phenomenon become worse? Could a tide of xenophobia sweep across Europe as it has in the past? Political views tend to polarize to the extremes when times are tough. Even in England perhaps? It's not a rare sight to see headlines in the right wing press in Britain about "floods" of immigrants from Eastern Europe undercutting the workforce and straining our welfare state. Similar sentiments to those expressed by many , but not all, on the streets of Vienna. In fact those same papers wrote similar headlines about Jewish immigrants in the 1930's. Could this happen elsewhere in Europe?

Now you might accuse me of being unfair towards Austrians, in fact 70 percent of the country voted for the more liberal parties, and that is true. We met plenty of nice Austrians who had no problem with living in a tolerant, multi cultural society , our translator and guide, himself a journalist, expressed the more liberal, majority view of the Austrian public . But 29 percent is still a large chunk of the population and many of them are young voters who care not about Austria's murky past and it's most famous son.

Austrians we spoke to who admitted to voting for Strache's Freedom Party, often started their sentences, with "i'm not a racist but..." a line i've heard many times myself spoken before following up with some racist vitriol. Many spoke of "protest" voting to force the ruling mainstream social democrats and conservatives into rethinking some of it's policies towards immigration, perhaps that's all it is, a protest vote, as happened in France several years back when Le Pen's party shocked the nation with a large share of the vote in the primaries before floundering in the main election. But it's a dangerous gamble nontheless for Austria, this was a general election and the far right now have a strong following in the heart of Europe.

Down The Ganges

2007-03-27T16:09:00.000-07:00

30,000 ft above India 27 March 2007

I’ve been fortunate enough to have just travelled across eastern India shooting a feature on the river Ganges or “Ganga” as it is known to the Indians for a british newspaper taking a snapshot of modern India along the way. Finding out how the country, economy and people really are faring in the new globalised world that we live in today. India is incredibly keen to show the world a image of a new India, with a powerful economy, largely in the IT sector, attracting huge overseas investment and a sharply rising middle class population with disposable incomes .

The Ganges is in total 1557 miles long and stretches from the foothills of the Himalayas to the Indian Port of Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal, supplying water to one twelfth of the world’s population, both rich and poor, but largely the latter of the two. The Ganges is worshipped by the Hindu faith , one of the three dominant religions in India, and is believed to be not only a source of life but also able to wash one's sins away, and Hindu's from across the globe make pilgrimage to the river along it’s course referring to it as “Ma Ganga.” after the mythical goddess whom the river is named after.

We started,two journalists Phil and Peter and a production assistant by the name of Shivani and myself in the tranquil town of Deoprayag , in the foothills of the Himalayas where the Bhagirathia and Alaknanda tributaries meet forming the great Ganga river . The river here is a lush, fast flowing emerald green, running pure from the Gangatree Glacier higher up in the snow crested peaks, and still good enough to drink without a moments hesitation. Here amongst other characters we met Ganesh Shnakar Bahtt, living in a cave adjacent to the town’s main Ghat (steps) to the holy river, which is uninhabitable much of the year when the water levels are high. With his dishevelled dreadlocks and completely incoherent dribble he wouldn’t have looked out of place on the Portobello Market in the mid nineties when the square was crowded with returnees from the hippy trail and friends they’d picked up on the way. His cave was full of personal possessions and baggage that had been dumped by devotees who’d decided to do away with such trappings and given their lives to the Gods.
Down on the Ghat a young , recently wedded couple were receiving a blessing from a Brahmin priest whilst a rickety old women with a walking stick, matted white hair and faded orange robes was filling a metal urn with water, just able to bend her arthritic joints enough to reach the waters level grabbing on to a rusty chain with one wrinkly old hand to prevent herself from falling in, though it appeared that soon she would be joining whoever it was being cremated on the far bank opposite. Miraculously I saw her again later that day shuffling past some Hindu scriptures on a temple wall high up on the hill above the Ghat .
Further along the Ganges lies the City of Rishikesh , the Yoga capital of the world, and attracting plenty of annoying western tourists because of it, but also bringing welcome revenue. It too is a popular spot for pilgrims and it also sports a wonderfully springy suspension footbridge where young families with their children throw in bait sold by hawkers onto the river’s suface a hundred feet below to enormous Rohu , a type of carp that schools eternally underneath the bridge, getting fat on such rich , easy pickings.
Up River from Rishikesh campsites have recently sprung up on the Ganga’s improbably sandy banks, and India’s new middle classes come to play here on the weekends, taking advantage of the fantasic white water rafting. We joined some young exec’s from India’s number one mobile phone company Airtel, who spent the weekend on a bonding exercise, rafting, playing volleyball and drinking copious amounts of alcohol whilst dancing round the nightly campfire to the sound of bagpipes . To them the Ganga was a playground , somewhere to let off steam away from their hectic, high-tech lives in Dehli and Bombay, a life so far removed from those we would meet later in our journey. They were incredibly optimistic about their nation’s future and believed firmly and somewhat I naively I think, that the wealth they’re accruing will ultimately trickle down to those further down the food chain, giving a leg-up the ladder of success to the majority peasant and working classes below that New India likes to pretend no longer exists. Just take one look at the advertising hoardings on the streets and glossy televison commercials playing round the clock, which I imagine are directed by India’s incredibly talented Bollywood set. The new India is inhabited by young , beautiful , well dressed men and women who walk hand in hand or driving fancy sportcars down freshly scrubbed, fragrant streets, their children grinning broadly with backwards turned baseball caps skipping alongside them. The terrible truth is that statistics point to completely the opposite, that in fact, like we are seeing in western Europe , the gap between rich and poor is actually increasing.

After Rishikesh we spent a night a the Ananda Spa “ the worlds number one Destination Spa “ where the Peter sampled their rather fascistic version of Ayervedic therapy In the name of journalism , having burning hot oil poured onto his forehead like some sort of medieval torture , luckily I just got to take pictures .

Next stop was Kanpur, a stinking, Industrial town, that belongs in the age of Dickens, where a few industrialists have made their fortunes off the backs of the poor working majority, and have managed to turn the Holy River herself into a stinking putrid gloopy mass, of course with the help of a few corrupt politicians, of which there seem to be many in the “New India”. Leather Tanneries are everywhere, and although there are regulations that have been put in place, they have never really been enforced and the factories spew out acids and heavy metals from the tanning process straight into the Ganga, her banks now sadly coated in a black tar like substance, her now charcoal grey waters slowly bubbling with toxins.
On the edge of town we spoke to fishermen about to set off in their rowing boat to earn their keep, they reminisced of their youths when the Ganga was still clean and teeming with fish , when there was plenty to feed everyone, but were doubtful whether those days would return. Of course the toxins being dumped by the factories into the river are added to by the untreated sewage of the City’s population, and considering the poor state and distinct lack of sufficient water treatment works across this city and others adjacent to the river, the state of the peoples health is in dire straights too, and ultimately that of the nation .

Miraculously, when we arrive in Varanasi, India’s oldest and holiest of cities, Ma Ganga has managed to purge herself of toxins , rejuvenating herself, and although you probably would be wise not to drink from her bosom, the stink and discloloration has definitely lifted, making this stretch of the river one of the last habitable spots for it’s blind freshwater Dolphins, which were once endangered but have now thankfully stabilised. The Ghats of Varanasi, over one hundred of them, are an incredible site, attracting hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year and once reportedly home to the God Shiva. Alongside the bathing ghats are also "burning ghats" where bodies are cremated in public, their ashes then given to the cleansing holy waters. Each night the "Ganga Aarti" ceremony is performed for pilgrims (and tourists) on the Dasaswamedh Ghat, an incredible spectacle as Brahmin priests swing flaming chalices to sutras accompanied by a thumping beat . I wonder whether the dreadlocked wannabe Sadhu Ganesh Bahtt had escaped to his cave in Deoprayag from Varanasi , possibly because in the latter characters like him are everywhere, but with no caves to light up there chillums from they resort to living in canvas tents along the Ghats earning a living from impressionable young western students on their gap years with a healthy sense of adventure.

We next take the train to the city of Patna in Bihar , India’s most lawless state, where rival gangs run by rival politicians terrorise the surrounding villages with extortion and kidnapping. We decided to try and meet some of these gang members and set off to the town of Mokama 90 kms east of the city where along Ma Gang’s banks devout local villagers were bathing to celebrate a partial solar eclipse. We were led into to forest adjacent to the river by a local fixer and from nowhere we suddenly heard strange obviously man-made animal noises being called out, which seemed to make the leaves on the trees flutter around us . Then appeared out of the dense trees and marujawana that grows here as thick as blackberry bushes, six or seven young men , their faces hidden by brightly coloured bandana’s and sarong cloth . Brandishing sickles and small axes it seemed like a scene from “Lord of the Flies” and I for one didn’t really know whether to quiver with fear or burst out laughing, but after I’d decided which emotion I felt most overwhelmed by it was best to keep my mouth shut and just get on with taking their pictures. After a brief interview with the two hacks , whom the bandits had decided were BBC (it pays never to quash such dreams and go with the flow in such a situation), they disappeared into the forest as quickly as they’d arrived their whooping and animal cries fading into the distance. We then had a brief discussion as to why these men, who we were assured were the real thing, and from reading of their exploits in the papers were obviously to be taken seriously, had wanted to meet western journalists. But I suppose just like the gangs in Britain’s cities who are now, and somewhat stupidly, hosting their own websites with photos and text boasting of their exploits , these men too crave the same thing, NOTORIETY . What better way to get famous quick than to speak to the international press. They can now say that spines tingle at hearing their name (the “Mokama Massive” or whatever it is) not only in Bihar, but also Hampshire and Massachusetts. If all this sounds slighty ridiculous, think again, their gang leader recently became a member of Parliament , showing how politics and crime run hand in hand in New India’s forgotten cities.

Before I continue something should be said about India’s trains, although somewhat dilapidated, they have a fantastic charm and move something like 200 million passengers a day across the India , putting our system to shame. Due to the immense traffic that travels by rail it is often wise to book long trips up to a month in advance if you want a good comfortable seat . The stations themselves are full of fantastic colour, and India’s poorest city dwellers often make their living here, gangs of young children , scour recently vacated carriages for scraps of food and fruit not only for sustenance but to sell to the hawkers who will add scavenged half eaten apples and oranges to their hand squeezed juices, so beware ! Other platform food though is fantastic , a steaming hot bowl of chickpeas , onions and roti go down rather well on a long rail journey. Cows can also be seen idly wandering along busy platforms occasionally rummaging in bins for orange peel and other vegan treats and being Holy , are only occasionally chased away by the hawkers and tramps who often depend on the same bounty .
The trains themselves , the ones I’ve been in anyway, though rather worn were still pretty comfortable and the 1st Class AC Sleeper cabins really did enable you to get a good kip on the longer overnight journeys that we took. Every now and then Peter and I would stand by one of the opened carriage doors as the train sped along smoking a cigarette whilst watching the world go by. Sadly what you’d often see is someone looking over their shoulder as their arse cheeks faced you in the squatting position , rail-side seeming to be a favourite spot for a majority peasant nation of outdoor crappers , not that you can criticise them considering that over 50 percent of Indians do not have indoor plumbing , something the governing elite of New India should be acutely ashamed of.

After two weeks of travelling we finally came closer to out final destination arriving in Calcutta , capital of West Bengal and home to Sagar Island, where the River Ganga finally meets with the ocean. Formerly the Capital of the British Raj until it was moved to Dehli in 1911, and home to some fantastic colonial architecture. The city is literally buzzing with energy , you can still see traditonal rickshaws originally introduced from China , being pulled by barefooted men , and the famous Bengal hot headedness that gave the British Raj a few scares is everywhere to be seen . Unlike in Dehli angry exchanges can be seen regularly being made on street corners and on the roads by drivers in their Morris Minor-like Ambassador taxi’s as they cut each other up on some of the most hectic roads I’ve ever witnessed.
Calcutta has been ruled by Marxists for the past three decades, making it the most successful and longest running elected Communist government in the world. Problem is it’s popularity has recently been marred by their poor handling of a forced aquisition of farmer’s land in the Nandigram area which we visited , for a "Special Economic Zone” or SEZ , which resulted in the killing by police of 14 demonstrators just over a week ago . We spoke to the villagers, who are incensed , evicting local party stooges off their territory and fighting running battles with police and party thugs . Although they were at onetime the traditional base with which the Marxists rose to power , they certainly won’t be at the next election. It’s a difficult problem for New India , and especially for the Marxists in West Bengal if they want to retain there somewhat dictatorial powers. It’s patently obvious that India needs the massive cash injection and job opportunities that foreign investment brings, and SEZ’s could be the answer , problem is the electorate don’t see it that way. How can you expect an uneducated peasant population to look beyond the short term ? Luckily for them pressure groups ( with their own own political agendas it has to be said ) have come to their aid and perhaps correctly have said …… do you really want your 10,000 acres of beautiful , fertile farmland to be turned into a mammoth Chemical Plant ? And furthermore what skills do any of you have to gain employment in such a place ? …. They’re right of course but what future does India have if it doesn’t Industrialize and join the global marketplace ? The investors will only go to one of the neighbouring countries instead and India’s deeply paranoid about the rise of China as a strong economic and military force to it’s East.

After a long drive south we crossed over by ferry to Sagar Island the final desination on our Odyssey . Annually the island plays host to hundreds of thousands of Hindu pilgrims who take part in the Gangasagar Mela festival bathing en masse, washing away their sins in Ma Ganga's waters. Here we came across a handful of off-season devotees and Muslim women who scour the long sandy beaches for coins thrown into the sea by the pilgrims proving that "Ma Ganga" really does provide for all.
The somewhat sweaty mosquito infested night we spent at one of the Island’s Ashram’s that evening will go down as one of the worst experiences of the trip along with the food, but I wouldn’t have it any other way! When I did finally fall asleep I was soon abruptly awoken by the sounds of crashing cymbals, drums and chanting at three thirty am, reminding me of, I hate to say it , irritating times in the past when I’ve come across the European Hari Krishna community marching down the street making a similar racket in the name of peace.

I decided to spend my last night in India in the Oberoi Grand hotel in central Calcutta, a fine old colonial style hotel , my wood panelled room wouldn’t have seemed out of place in a stately home in the home counties, and to me was absolute heaven after just over two weeks on the road, working from 16 hour days! After a couple of hours by a pool surrounded by palms gently swaying in the light evening breeze, I moved to my room and ordered a cheeseburger and milkshake on room service and settled into some crap Hollywood movie on cable , finally escaping the impoverished world outside my mahogany doors……..

Cuba

2006-08-09T16:32:00.000-07:00

Havana 9 August 2006

Last week i received a panic call from my office after news that Fidel Castro was seriously ill and had handed power over to his brother and Defence Minister Raul. I couldn't believe it, a dream come true, finally i would have my chance to see the country for myself .The adopted home of the late Che Guevara, where the communist experiment still exists, the rogue state that Kennedy tried and failed to smother at birth, exploding CIA cigars(that fortunately never did) and home to Fidel Castro; father of the peoples revolution who has survived nine U.S presidents!

Myself and a reporter posed as tourists on a six day package holiday to Varadero, the largest resort in the Caribbean with over 25,000 beds,tourism on an industrial scale, and until Hugo Chavez came to power in Venezuela, Cuba's economic saviour after the fall of the Berlin wall and European communism crippled the state for a decade.
The tourists seem to be predominantly of Spanish origin,whether from Spain or South America with a smattering of Canadians, English other Europeans and a handful of Americans.
After a gruelling 20 hour journey, don't ask me why, we finally arrived at our resort 100 miles from Havana, only to get a taxi back to the capital the next morning to get on with the task at hand.
Havana is a beautiful city, although now crumbling in parts, Havana Vieja (the old town) is now a U.N world heritage site and many of the grand 17th century Spanish colonial buildings have been restored to their former glory, but outside the Saccharine sweet old Havana where most tourists remain it's another story.
The once grand buildings where the Cuban elite used to reside along grand tree-lined avenues like the Paseo di Marti now house "the people" with their crumbling faded pastel facades hinting at an era that disappeared with the east coast mafia and Miami's emigre` population.
The romantic in me feels a sense of pride with what had happened in 1959, imagine the arrogant elite in Park Lane being ousted from their homes and the common people taking their place, but in reality the life of the average Cuban is not a good or a fair one. The wage for a professional doctor for instance is in the region of $25 U.S a month and someone in a sate run restaurant half that. With the advent of tourism one feels the sense of rubbing their noses in it, something that Fidel was deeply concerned about when he decided to reintroduce tourism. Now not only can Cubans see they way others live via illegal satellite dishes but also on the streets of Havana, beggars are everywhere, persistent, not aggressive, but after a while annoying none the less. Every other male seems to be offering you discount cigars, and shopkeepers seem just as happy to try and fleece you if they can, and who can blame them. The sad thing is underneath the veneer of socialism and it's moral values ,the Cubans seem more obsessed with the dollar than anyone I've ever come across on my travels.
Cuban girls walking down the street( and i have to admit they are on the whole, depending on your taste, the most beautiful in the world i have seen so far) with their caramel skin, often bleached hair,skin tight knee length denims and trashy blouses,they eye you with a sullen,somewhat resigned sexual gaze. Everything is for sale in Cuba and more, this is the tragedy of Cuba today.
One day whilst walking through central Havana i was befriended by a school teacher who talked me into going to his favourite bar for a Mohjito , as we watched a Cuban rap trio perform we talked about life under Fidel and his experiences as a teenager during Battista's last corrupt days as Presidente. "The problem was that under Battista you were either in the incredibly rich minority or incredibly poor" and although he admitted as many in the west say that the health and education system in Cuba is one to be admired he added that "after you gain your degree what is there for a young Cuban graduate to do? There are no jobs, no money" and with the health system he confirmed that medical supplies are always hard to come by, most Cubans rely on shipments overseas from friends and relatives.
This might sound somewhat a shallow generalization of the Cuban psyche, but i can't help feeling watching the Cubans in the Salsa bars,discos and along the Malecon seafront where they gather in their hundreds on hot sticky summer evenings, is that if it wasn't for their typically latin love of dance,music and incredibly overt sexuality life would be unbearable.
Life at home seems incredibly drab and void of emotion, even with all our wealth and "mod cons" compared to theirs, Viva Cuba...
I'm sure that Cuba has held some part of our imagination over the years, with iconic images of Che Guevara, Fidel and the Kennedy / failed Bay of Pigs saga permeating across the media for generations,not to mention Pacino's role in De Palma's Scarface.
For me it was one of the countries i wanted to make sure i visited before Castro died and the inevitable end of an era that will come with his demise which now looks closer than ever before.
It won't be long now before these tired but beautiful old streets of Havana will once again be inhabited by the elite, leaving "the people" to the concrete slums and shanty towns of any modern day Latin American city, the Cuban Narco thugs will be back on the streets, and obese American tourists on weekend trips from Miami parading down the Malecon with a Starbucks Frappe Latte in one hand and a Cuban girl on their arm...
For those of you who still believe there is a God please say a prayer for Cuba.

Kandahar

2006-06-25T16:16:00.000-07:00

Kandahar,June 2006

It's strange being back in Afghanistan for the first time in 4 years and not getting to see any of it, often the way on an embed with the military. It seems so far removed from the life many of us led here in 2001, living with the people(well the men anyway!),and the rag tag mujahedin of the Nothern Alliance day by day, reporting on the B52 aided demise of the Taliban state as we moved from town to town on unmetalled roads that seemed to never end, with views of the Hindu Kush i wished never would.

As interesting as embeds can often,but not always, be, the one thing they lack is any connection with the real world around you. One can go to endless briefings and speak to soldiers with the best intentions in the world, but without the ability to converse with the indigenous population what kind of a picture do you come home with, how do we know if our "ethical foreign policy" is really working out, that we'll be able ultimately to eradicate poverty and the root causes of terrorism and oppression?

What i have gleaned from a night time patrol with British soldiers in a small dusty town north of Kandahar, was that the locals seemed relatively friendly, but not exactly breaking a leg to come over and have a chat and thank these young men for giving them the "security" that comes with a large deployment of western soldiers on their doorstep. The men were often sat cross-legged chatting quietly in groups outside their homes, relishing the break from the unbearably hot days as we walked past unannounced in our body armour in single file through the shadows. Only the dogs seemed to take any notice, as in Iraq they welcomed us from a distance, sensing our smell i guess, warning others of the impending presence of the Foreign invaders. From what the Paratroopers told me, the the young men in one of the villages further north often throw stones at them as they patrol. Take from this what you will, I'm merely the messenger, passing on the scraps that I've managed to gather.

The largest of the military bases i've visited is situated around the Airport outside Kandahar, the first and only place U.S troops in any numbers fought for in 2001,and a one time Russian Military base in the 1980's. It's now a home not only for Americans, but also Rumanian, Dutch, Australian and British peacekeepers with a Burger King, PizzaHut(which delivers), Subway and a Starbucks style coffee house where handsome young fighter pilots drink Iced Frappe Latte's in between missions.

I'm stuck here for the next few days with nothing to do except wander aimlessly around the immense, dusty camp in the searing 46 degree heat between my poorly air conditoned tent,which is unbearable during the day, and past the junk food trailers to the American PX, where soldiers fill up on Gatorade,body building pills, and gun magazines. Fat KBR contractors tend to buzz around the Pizza Hut trailer like flies on shit, whilst they rake in thousands of dollars a week, to sit in air condtioned pickup trucks, occasionally fixing a broken generator between mouth-fulls of pizza and chewing tobacco. The Afghans only get to empty bins and mop floors, for security reasons, earning wages that i can't imagine make much of an impact on the local economy. Of course U.S Vice President Dick Cheney continues to make a fortune from this perversity, along with may others in the West. When i tried today at the Launderette to say hello and ask how they were in my few words of Pashtu to the workers who were sullenly mopping the floor around my feet and emptying the bins, they responded with a silent glance whilst being sternly observed by a surly Russian woman, who herded them from trailer to trailer.

I wonder whether their fathers had the same kind of jobs twenty years ago, when the Russians were in our place, with the same promises of democracy, education for all, economic stability, and a modern way of life ? Of course in those days there were also bearded, religious zealots in the hills ambushing military convoys with weapons bought with foreign money, garnering popular support amongst the remote villages where they would seek refuge when the helicopters gunships would come to hunt them down.

When i first heard the news, months before an announcement was made in Parliament, that British troops were being deployed to the badlands of Afghanistan, i welcomed it. For the last five years it has seemed as though not enough was being done outside of Kabul, with our european allies reluctant to weed out what was left of the Taliban, for fear of losing lives, and to invest in the infrastructure of a nation that was far more fragile,at risk and dilapidated than Iraq. America was the only nation with enough troops on the ground trying to finish the military side of the job, hunting down Bin Laden etc and clearly making a mess of it on their own. Hopefully "Operation Mountain Thrust" or Mount 'n' Thrust as us cynical journalists like to call it will be a success and not just another excercise in alienating the majority of the population who are sick and tired of political and religious rhetoric and thirty years of war. The British generals and politicians in briefings tell us it's about building roads and schools,literally,with a smattering of military support, but we all know its really about killing