From West To East
Nir
Registered Users Posts: 1,400 Major grins
11-Dec-2009, Jerusalem – Parallel to the first human rights march taking place on the International Day For Human Rights in Tel-Aviv, several dozen Jewish-Israeli activists in Jerusalem marched in solidarity with East-Jerusalem Palestinians. From West to East was the slogan for the march that began in Jerusalem’s downtown area in the west and progressed to the Arab neighborhood of Sheik Jarach in the east, ending in a demonstration at the El-Kurd home, from which the Palestinian El-Kurd family were evicted by court order in November. Their home has since been taken over by Jewish right-winged settlers.
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My biggest photo journalistic lesson learned yesterday - after two hours of marching and about one hour at the demonstration I was getting tired and bored. I was anxious to get home to download, post-process and transmit the images. So I left.
Ten minutes later all hell broke loose. Conclusion; 6 policemen injured, 21 protesters arrested. And I missed the fun!
And another lesson I still have't processed completely - I shot these with the Canon G10. I am extremely pleased with the results in regard to image quality! It was fun and convenient!
But, the other photographers looked at me in disgust and contempt and the protesters were sure I was an undercover cop (they told me so). Your thoughts?
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My biggest photo journalistic lesson learned yesterday - after two hours of marching and about one hour at the demonstration I was getting tired and bored. I was anxious to get home to download, post-process and transmit the images. So I left.
Ten minutes later all hell broke loose. Conclusion; 6 policemen injured, 21 protesters arrested. And I missed the fun!
And another lesson I still have't processed completely - I shot these with the Canon G10. I am extremely pleased with the results in regard to image quality! It was fun and convenient!
But, the other photographers looked at me in disgust and contempt and the protesters were sure I was an undercover cop (they told me so). Your thoughts?
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Comments
It's funny how much all protests resemble each other. People line up, carry signs, confront each other. I have shots from events in Boston in the snow that look a lot like these shots in quite a different place and climate. So it's especially nice to see this:
which breaks the mold. It's very hard to do this. I even got all the way down on the ground and still had trouble getting an angle that was unique.
Using the G10 is probably a lot like using the GF1. You are no longer a photojournalist to the people at the event. This is both good and bad. You are more invisible. But what are you? A cop? A tourist? A creep? People don't know what bag to put you in. Weegee said something relevant here:
One thing I missed about previous P&S cameras that I like about the GF1 is the ability to use limited DOF. It's nice to get really large DOF as you have here, but I would have liked a less sharp background in several, for example:
www.Dogdotsphotography.com
I edited your post to number the pics. It makes commenting easier.
Demonstrations do all look similar, but you managed to get some original angles here in 3, 12, 13, 14 and 21. You caught a good moment in 10. What was he throwing and at whom? I also liked the casual pose of the cop (soldier?) in 11--ho hum, another day, another demonstration.
Regarding the P&S, you did very well with it and it is a lot easier to manage. Also easier to run with if violence breaks out.
As for missing all the fun at the end, I imagine you have learned your lesson, and (sadly) won't have to wait long to get another chance.
Cheers,
The sign reads in Hebrew: "Open your eyes: Apartheid"
I like it how a 8 or 9 year old girl takes responsibility for educating the public. Reminds me of "The Emperor’s New Clothes" by Hans Christian Andersen.
I too greatly enjoy the limited DOF attainable with my 5D and EF35mm f/2 for example. Very artistic. But is it photojournalistic? When trying to convey reality from a documentary point of view the reality seen by the human eye is not f/2 DOF. "F/8 and be there" was the rule of the trade for decades.
Don't get me wrong - I'd love to be able to control DOF with the G10. It's just not possible and the advantages this little camera can give sometimes far out-weigh this limitation.
This whole series was shot in Aperture Priority, usually wide open. Most of the shots, including your example, at 6.1mm (28mm equivalent) and f/2.8. But the purpose of these settings was to get fastest possible shutter speeds.
The G10 shutter lag is negligible. Almost non-existent. But the camera does slow you down due to slow and inaccurate electronic zoom, and delay to next shot when shooting RAW even in continuous shooting mode (which I always use). Shooting at "the decisive moment" becomes very critical with the G10 because the delays usually don't allow for a 2nd chance. With the 5D in continuous shooting mode I am more sloppy in this regard. I shoot 2-7 frames in quick succession and then choose the best one when editing. The G10 forces me to be more accurate and decisive and that's a good thing I think.
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Another thing I'd like to point out (I know BD doesn't like being told what he's seeing), something which you would probably need to know the intimacies of Israeli politics to notice. This photo series and my caption tell the story of the march and demonstration. But there's another story being told here, not so obvious.
These left-wing protesters have quite a lot of opposition in the Israeli society. You can see it here:
here:
in the contempt in #9 (who knows what he's praying for?) and in the security these guys received in #11 and #15.
On 10-Feb-1983 Emil Grunzweig was murdered by a hand grenade thrown into a left-wing demonstration in Jerusalem. Are these signs of more internal-Israeli violence to come ...
Nir Alon
images of my thoughts
Really good series, Nir! Nice work. And the lesson definitely is to stay until the bitter end, because what you describe never fails to happen - leave, and all hell will break loose. (A million years ago, in my early reporting days, I was working on a big feature on the "Shock Trauma Unit," at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore. A photographer and I staked out the place for three consecutive Friday and Saturday nights. And nothing happened. In that entire time there was a single admission, of a guy who fell out of a tree and broke his femur. So after three weeks we said 'to hell with it,' and decided to work with what we had. That Sunday at 7 a.m. my phone rang at home, and when I picked it up I heard laughter on the other end, and then the voice of the unit's psychiatrist, who identified himself and said 'last night we had 17 admissions. The elevator broke and we were carrying patients on stretchers down the stairscase from the heilpad. Then we ran out of gurneys, and we were putting patients on desks. Too bad you weren't here.'
I never again left a scene before whatever I was covering was OVER.
"He not busy being born is busy dying." Bob Dylan
"The more ambiguous the photograph is, the better it is..." Leonard Freed