4 Weeks Old Today...!!

After a sleepless first 4 weeks and after great demand from family and friends all over the planet... here are a few more photos of Ekaterina... and now that we're more settled hopefully we'll get to see you all again slowly slowly... and many many thank yous for all your cards and best wishes...

Welcome to the World... Ekaterina-Andromeda

I've been a bit neglectful of my BLOG for the last few months not having made any new posts since covering the wild fires in Greece over the Summer... reason being I've been taken up with looking after my new wife Anna in her last few months of pregnancy and spending some quality time together in what were the last few months that we'd ever again be alone together.. and the culmination was this morning at 7:45am when after 26 hours of labour Ekaterina-Andromeda was finally born to us... and here she is.. a few minutes old... and then a little later on having had a little rest and a feed... needless to say we're totally besotted and as the cliché goes.. our lives will never be the same again... and having met her after nine months of talking to a belly.. who'd ever want their lives to be the same again anyway..

Day 5 wild fires in Greece

Day 5 in the villages around the epicentre of the wild fires near Ancient Olympia and whilst fires are still breaking out and firemen continue to do battle with unforgiving elements the cost to the lives of villagers throughout the region is now beginning to be counted. The worst affected are the elderly most of whom get by on a paltry 200 euros a month from their pensions. Many have been burned out of their homes and are now either sleeping in the charred remains of their tiny houses or in their open yards. Most of their livestock have been burned and for those that survived they have nothing to feed them with. The landscape is barren. Trees that stood over 30 metres now reduced to blackened stumps. Their branches are now ashes that waft in the atmosphere and swirl in eddies of wind. The disaster both to the people and to the environment is huge. The scale cannot be described in words or pictures. From one horizon to the other from mountain to mountain and valley to valley the only view that greets the eye is of a black and charred waste land. As one old man told me.. "All our beautiful trees are gone and now in my old age I havent even got a shady tree to sit under and rest"

Ancient Olympia - Wild Fires

On the fourth day of wild fires raging throughout Greece the village of Ploutohori near the site of Ancient Olympia, was the latest to be threatened by flames from all sides being fanned by strong and ever changing winds.
Animals unable to be saved by their owners were abandoned in their pens or left chained up. Their decaying charred remains now are left to fester until officials can come and take stock so that damages can be paid to their owners. Those animals which by some miracle escaped now huddle together in a single part of a blackened field with no grass to eat or water to drink.

Greece - Forest Fires

The worst forest fire season on record in Greece climaxed over the last two days with over 100 fires raging throughout the country resulting in over 50 deaths (and rising…) and thousands of acres worth of forest lost.

Today a fire raged on Hymettos Mountain. Pine forest was razed, houses and blocks of flats were burned and a pall of smoke hung over the city blotting out the sun and turning the landscape orange. The smell of burned pine is in the air and ash falls from the sky like snow. The feeling is one of siege.. it feels as though the city and the country are at war.

Clearly the result of not only one of the hottest ever summers with temperatures hitting 47 C but in most part the result of arsonists. Conspiracy theories are also raging from it being the work of foreigners unhappy with Greece for whatever reason, to it being the work of leftist extremists set on over-throwing the government…

Whatever the reasons, the people of Greece could not be more depressed with the situation.. I’ve spoken to many who break into tears at the thought of the loss both human and environmental. A woman and her four children were burned alive in their car trying to escape flames fanned by high winds, Athens last oasis of greenery in Parnitha was almost completely burned with the loss of rare flora and fauna.

The feeling of helplessness, sadness and anger is tangible.

Russian Smoke-Jumpers

The Taiga. A forest circling the entire Northern hemisphere running through Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, the Baltic states and the largest part through Siberia. Described as the Lungs of Europe and at almost 4 million square kilometers, is largest Boreal forest in the world. To date the Siberian Taiga has lost approximately 7 million hectares of forest to fire.

The idea of this project was to document the efforts of a handful of poorly equipped men to douse the flames that every year from May to July blaze through this beautiful and largely untouched forest. Caused by lightning strikes and careless hunters/tourists the annual fires raze thousands of trees. Recovery to a decent level can take 100 years. Full recovery can take up to 400. These men, paid a pittance, jump out of helicopters on ropes, jump from planes by parachute, walk miles through dense forest, with a water bladder on their back and a chainsaw as their only weapons against the fire.. they do it because they love the job, and to quote one of them, “I could work in a factory and ruin my health, here I may risk my health but at least the result is one to be proud of.” Their effort and commitment is heroic.
To shoot the story I came to the edge of the former Soviet Union to a city called Khabarovsk in the Russsian Far East. It really does feel like being on the edge of the planet. A city built on the banks of the river Amur bordering Northern China.This was never going to be an easy self-imposed assignment. Apart from the costs involved.. so far running to 6000 Euros… the logistics involved in coming so far, the permissions needed to be obtained, the health risks.. the forests during the summer here are plagued by ticks carrying a deadly form of encephalitis, so far this season 15 people have died from it.. not an easy task. My thanks to my brother-in-arms and friend Savvas Eleftheriades, without whose talent as a fixer extra-ordinaire and Russian speaker I would never have gotten as far as I have.
Unfortunately with a week to go before our time and money run out the story is not complete and the liklihood of completion looks bleak. Unseasonal rains have doused most of the fires and whilst this is good news for the forest, it has made this trip into a huge gamble to shoot a story at great expense in time and money without the chance of re-couping through publication.

The story has been covered from every angle… and I’ve only got one more photo to get, the “money-shot” … flames from the ground torching the forest… and with the weather turned against us, opportunities to get the shot are fading fast along with our spirits. Waiting in the very expensive and very run-down hotel “Tourist” one eye on the weather outside and the other on the phone, waiting for it to ring with the word that a fire has sprung is proving frustrating to say the least.

Signing off for now… with hopefully better news to come…

George

GOLDEN CASH RETRIEVERS

I was commissioned back in January to provide some PR images for Canine Partners - a worthy charity training dogs to assist people with a disability (predominantly wheelchair users) - from taking washing out of the machine to.. yes.. drawing money from a cash point.. ok.. they can't actually punch the pin number in, but amazingly they can put the card in the slot, take the money and get the receipt!

After hours getting the standard PR stuff of the "team" raising money at Canary Wharf, I got the opportunity to shoot inside HSBC after they had made a presentation to the marketing bods there. As soon as I had set the shot up I knew it would be an image that would capture the imagination.. despite the strength of the image unfortunately HSBC themselves weren't interested in purchasing the image.. but not surprisingly were very keen for me to submit it wherever I could..

A couple of weeks later I submitted the image to various national publications.. amazingly enough the first to respond was METRO (London) and the following day it got a half page on Page 3. The day after that it was picked up by The Daily Mail, by the end of the week it was posted on over 300 sites and blogs on the internet from Turkey to Peru.. was being discussed on Radio 2 and Radio 4 amongst others, appeared in various local papers, it was even picked up by gossip magazine REVEAL, and it has since appeared on the BBC's "Have I Got News for You".