No flash please!

Graca Michel reacts as the frail Nelson Mandela lifts his cane to acknowledge a member of the crowd as he is helped onto stage for the Sixth Annual Nelson Mandela Lecture in Kliptown Soweto.

The Sixth Annual Nelson Mandela lecture was delivered by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the President of Liberia and the first democratically elected female President in Africa.

Photographing Nelson Mandela is always a bit tricky, so much so, that this is the second entry to touch on it. It gets trickier, when you are only able to photograph for a few minutes. The press sit in the waiting room and then at a specific time run (all the time jostling for that elusive front position) to a door, where we wait again... The door opens everyone squeezes through and gets to the front of the stage, pick your positions well, cause you can't move much. Low light, no flash allowed when shooting Madiba. He is lead to the front of the stage, and their is always one idiot that decides to use flash anyway (which resulted in someone coming and standing right in front of me, to tell him to stop). After what feels like two nanoseconds, we are ushered out, and you're standing outside, hoping you got something usable...luckily I did.

Get in, sit down, shut up and hang on !

A SAPS chopper that crashed after hitting powerlines whilst chasing two armed robbers in Meadowlands, Soweto.

I'm sure it was one helluva ride...

A real exercise!

On our way to a march at the SABC, Chris (Citizen reporter) and I get a call from the office, a bus is on fire near Lenasia, so we turn around and speed off towards where this bus is, eventually we come to some traffic. Taking a chance, I lean out of the car window and call a Metro-Police officer over, I explain that we're from the press, hoping that he will tell us how far the bus is away from us, he promptly stops all the cars and ushers us through, So, now we have the highway to ourselves and I'm telling Chris how astonished I am that we got that response from the police. We come up to the scene and stop, I jump out and run to the flames, after about a minute it dawns on me that even thought this scene includes two busses and a tanker on fire, there is no injured people around, but I carry on moving around shooting, then Chris comes up to me and says "Its a play", only then do I realise that the whole incident is a exercise to test the response of the emergency services.... Guess it was also a test for us... Maybe I should have cottoned on when I seen the spray paint on the tanker "Out of Order".

Refugee camps

A lone guard watches the empty tents of the Kaserne refugee camp near Johannesburg. The old Kaserne shunting station will be used to house thousands of refugees that fled from xenophobic violence recently .

The soon to be populated Kaserne refugee camp is in an old shunting yard in Johannesburg, but at least it has a roof, and the UNHCR tents are a far cry from the ones that most of these people had recently (if they were lucky!). The whole situation is really dire, these people cannot do anything to help themselves and will probably stay in these camps for a long, long time.

Some serious rubbish

South African Municipal Workers (SAMWU) members spread rubbish on the streets of Edenvale, Johannesburg. They are protesting about working conditions and pay. Wow, these guys sure made a mess, tipping over refuse bins, emptying them all over the street and lobbing black bags all over the place.
Even though I'm really not a fan of this (especially because I live in Edenvale), I do understand why they do it. The only time the municipalities will listen to anyone is when some form of action similar to this is done.
It's the same with the government, people can talk, people can shout, people can even beg, but it seems they only listen when it becomes a problem for them...