The Emerging Products Picture Editor position is only a year old here at the big G. There are two of us doing it, based in New York City, at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel. Chris Hondros shot this picture from the ‘bubble’, where we sit in the big, dirty, noisy urban jungle:

Basically, we select News, Sports and Entertainment images that are wholly owned, publish them to a third party platform that sends the product called Picturecast each morning and afternoon to cell phone subscribers in the USA. It is available to subscribers on Sprint, Cingular, Boost and Nextel for a monthly fee. It is like publishing a little newspaper each day, and with few restrictions, we can use all the images on our Editorial site. We have to keep up with breaking news so it’s all ready for publishing time (8am and 6pm EST). The News screen looks like this:

Editing for little mobile screens restricts our choices, one thing to consider is how it will read. It’s great when we get great jubo shots like this:

But the emotion on the faces is not going to read well small, so we choose another shot or crop it. Another consideration is our audience range. Lots of 13-year old kids out there have their own cell phones and we must be careful not to offend. Needless to say, although we had fun stuff a few weeks ago from AVN Expo that Justin Sullivan shot, we did not use it. My personal favorite finds are animals, but when we have awesome images from award shows like the Oscars or Olympus Fashion Week, it is like being a kid in a candy store. We also provide Cingular with a selection of NFL and College football images for their ‘Week in Pictures’. There are other exciting things in the pipeline, which I probably should not let out of the bag just yet. Watch this space.

Ash on the car in the morning, the smell of burning Eucalypt, it must be bushfire season again. Just when I thought a lazy Sunday afternoon by the beach might be on the cards, the call came in: “Bush fires are threatening homes north of Sydney”. I had, earlier in the day, suspected a bushfire emergency might emerge, as the outside conditions were very hot, very dry, and very windy, kind of like standing inside a hair dryer.

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Step one was to pack the car with water, lots of it, and my regulation bush fire fighting protective clothing consitsing of fire resistant jacket, trousers, gloves, helmet, goggles and boots. Basically the same as the Rural Fire Service uses, but with a luminescent “MEDIA” patch emblazoned on the back.

Next was to pinpoint the fire front on a map, and try to get to it. Australian bushfires, whilst burning vast areas of land, are extremely tricky to get to, usually because they are burning in pretty inaccessable terrain. I had heard on the radio that families had been evacuated from the popular picnic area of Bobbin Head, so that’s where I was headed. Police had set up roadblocks around the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park to prevent rubberneckers, tourists, and media from entering. Only residents who wanted to get home to defend their properties were allowed into the restricted area. My way forward barred, I drove in a loop around the national park, to find another roadblock but this one was attended by the Rural Fire Service (RFS) instead of the police. The RFS media officer Rebel Talbert gathered together some of the assembled media for a quick briefing, and then herded us into her 4×4 for a trip to see what was happening on the fire ground.

We found several crews from many districts of Sydney with their fire tenders, conducting a back-burning excercise in the national park. Stepping through the brittle undergrowth, it’s little wonder how this material provides fire with potentially explosive raw fuel. The leaf litter on the ground is ankle deep and bone dry. The back burning operation seems to me like a tightrope walking exercise. the RFS are deliberately lighting fires in these conditions, and trying to keep them controlled, so that when the firefront eventually reaches the area, the backburning has depleted much of the fuel and the fire is easier to control.

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With alarming speed huge flames rear up from a tree that has caught fire in the canopy nearby, and the firefighters rush to hose it down before it can leap over the road and escape into the bush beyond. They succeed, with glowing embers and ash raining down from the force of the high-pressure hose on the burining tree trunk. Eyes are peeled for evidence of an ember attack over the road, where a fire can suddendly burst back into life. A water-bombing aircraft is audible overhead, huge sky cranes that can carry a payload of 9,000 litres of water to dump directly on the firefront. Smoke renders everything beyond a few metres invisible though, and the chopper comes and goes. Time for a drink of water, and the backburning continues down into the valley.

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On a different edge of the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park a couple of hours later, I arrive to see streets crowded with people who have come out of their homes to watch a spectacle that is awesome. The ridge of the national park beyond this small enclave of homes is ablaze, and the entire sky is orange in the dusk. “I’m going to go and get the hose again” says a resident as the sight fills her with worry for her home, and hurries away to hose down her house roof and guttering.

In all, the RFS save all the homes that were threatened, and controlled the fire within a couple of days, with the help of some friendlier weather. Disaster averted, this time.

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Tens of thousands of Hindu pilgrims had already jammed the hazy river banks at the holy confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna and mythical Saraswati rivers at 3 AM as I arose from my tent. I was in north India to photograph the most auspicious bathing day of the 45-day Kumbh Mela Festival, the largest religious gathering in the world. This year, up to 70 million are expected to attend.

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Unfortunately for some photographers, the Indian authorities decided to lock down river traffic, effectively shutting us off from access to the holy site, as our journalist camp was located across the river to the southwest. I piled into a rickety, wooden boat with a German photographer, three hours before sunrise, as we attempted to flout the traffic ban and traverse the river to the site. We managed to cross the water without difficulty but we were unable to land on the other side as the banks werew heavily guarded by unflinching Indian police who shooed our boat away at every turn. I began to think that getting into Iraq would have been easier. We eventually maneuvered a couple of miles upstream and we were able to dock on the north side of the river, along with two AFP colleagues.

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Thinking that we were in the clear, we walked back down the river bank towards the site. Yet the Indian authorities again blocked our way and forced us to hike through an endless, circuitous maze of checkpoints and back roads as dawn quickly approached.

After countless negotiations with various police officers and hours of hiking, we managed to break away from the herded route and make our way to the spot called Sangam, which is considered the holiest of places to bath as it is at the exact meeting point of the three rivers. Just as the sun began to rise, the Juna Akhara sect, an unpredictable lot of thousands of naked Sadhus (holy men), paraded past me through the dust and down to the water to bathe. Notoriously unfriendly to photographers, one Sadhu slapped my camera away as he danced past on his way to the river.

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The collective energy of the masses was palpable and quite a beautiful thing to experience. The pilgrims buzzed with excitement as they approached Sangam and yelped with ecstatic joy as they finally were able to immerse themselves into the holy, albeit heavily polluted, water. As the day wore on, millions of pilgrims filed down to Sangam to have their holy dip, which supposedly wipes away all sins and paves the way to salvation. A certain Getty Images photographer, not without sin and not wanting to miss the opportunity, eventually joined them.

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