Vliegtuigcrash door de ogen van een fotoredacteur
Boven de redactie van De Standaard passeren er ook vaak vliegtuigen, maar zoiets hebben wij ook nog niet meegemaakt.
Interessant om te lezen hoe die foto’s de hele wereld rondgaan in een paar minuten om dan in ons fotosysteem te belanden.
Via Reuters blog
Gary Hershorn is the Reuters News pictures editor for the Americas
It was another ordinary Thursday in the Thomson Reuters building in Times Square.
I was spending endless hours at my desk on the 19th floor, helping to work out the logistics for next week’s presidential inauguration and talking with photographer Eric Thayer.
The quiet was broken at about 3:30pm when a colleague yelled out to the newsroom: “There is an airplane in the water!”
Gary Hershorn
Photographer Brendan McDermid and I jumped up and ran twenty feet to the window and saw a plane floating in the water, with some people on the wings. Eric grabbed his cameras and laptop and ran to the river. Someone ran into a training course and notified photographer Mike Segar about the crash; he also headed to the river. Chip East, who was at home, followed them to see what he could get.
Brendan had a camera on his desk and a 400mm lens on the floor. He grabbed them and started shooting. I had to dig into a drawer and find a camera, a battery and a compact flash card. I had a 500mm lens in a case under my desk.
By the time I got it all together and headed back to the window, the plane had drifted out of sight behind a water tower. Brendan ingested his disk into our remote photo editing system and ran out of the office to the river. I stood at the window and within a couple minutes the plane drifted back into view, just as a ferry arrived on the scene. While this was happening, photo editors in Washington started to edit Brendan’s pictures.
While looking at the plane I was shouting out info to the journalists who were writing the story: “It’s a big plane, looks like a US Airways plane I think, lots of people on the wings.”
It took about a minute for the plane to drift behind a building. I only shot about 30 frames before it disappeared from sight again. At that point I ingested the images, made a selection, blew one up huge to confirm it was a US Airways plane and sent the first picture to our picture desk in Singapore for transmission to the wire.
Within minutes it seemed Brendan was back in front of me with pictures from ground level. He was able to shoot some pictures of passengers and grabbed a pedicab to take him back to Times Sq. His pictures kept the flow of fresh images flowing.
Eric Thayer
Eric Thayer arrived at the river and saw a group of firemen running to a big ferry boat. He asked if he could go aboard and was told yes, as long as he stayed out of the way. Eric was able to get up close to the plane and take some of the most dramatic photos of the day, of passengers in life rafts waiting to be rescued.
Eric was able to send a few pictures from the boat, on the river, thankfully having taken his laptop with him.
“The passengers looked scared, and fatigued. It was pretty cold, and many of them weren’t wearing coats, since most of their jackets were probably underwater in the overhead bins,” he said.
Once Eric was back on shore he ingested his pictures into our editing system using a wireless connection and I transmitted while sitting in the office.
Mike Segar walked along the river staying with the plane as it drifted farther and farther south. Chip East did the same, stopping to file some quick pictures.
Just as the stars aligned — a plane crash without loss of a single life — our coverage all fell into place with the extreme good fortune of us being able to see the plane from our newsroom window, and Eric arriving at the river just as rescue crews were loading onto a boat. Images were sent to the world within minutes of the plane hitting the water.
You can’t plan for a plane crash like you can for the inauguration of a president. Everything is based on luck and quick decisions. Thursday it all fell into place for us.
Looking at the pictures in newspapers on Friday morning, three of our photos got major play:
one by Brendan McDermid of the plane in the water with passengers standing on the wings,
one by Gary Hershorn of a ferry pulling up next to the plane
one by Eric Thayer of passengers sitting in a life raft looking at a diver
It was a complete team effort to get those images to the world.
Brendan McDermid
