Birds

Having wandered down to the quayside of the small north German town of Eckernfoerde, our aim was to feed dried bread to a bunch of hungry seagulls. They were sitting on ice in Eckernfoerde's small port, awaiting charitable donations from passers-by or the odd fishing boat coming in.

Once we opened our bag, I understood how Hitchcock made his scare-movie 'The Birds'. The gulls got very excited and started circling us, picking bread from our extended hands. An outright brawl erupted on the ground in front when we dropped some pieces. From then on, it was easy taking pictures: place camera on icy floor, aim, push button and hope for the best. The G10's shutter lag made precise timing impossible, as the cloud of squabbling and fighting gulls resembled a cartoon whirlwind. Although this won't win any prizes for authentic wildlife documentation or revolutionary art photography, I nevertheless enjoyed it tremendously.

Anonymous

A less flattering side-story to the Wikileaks scandal concerns the hacktivst group anonymous. Shortly after several major companies and banks announced that they would no longer do business with Wikileaks, hackers around the world united to crash the corporate websites of those companies through distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. This has been widely written about, but less widely photographed as, well, you can't, really.

We have all seen pictures of 404 errros when websites are down, but much less so of the people who cause them. Seeing the live IRC chatrooms where hackers co-ordinate and group into 'hives' to carry out attacks was truly fascinating, but I was still lacking that photographic illustration. The media widely reported that the group calling itself 'Anonymous' was behind the attacks; my subjects claim that anonymous is such an amorphous body of people it would be nearly impossible to pin-point the mastermind behind it all. Apparently, there are several sub-groups, the most aggressive being Anon Ops which claimed responsibility for the majority of recent DDoS attacks.

Now before anybody jumps to conclusions - the two brave guys who allowed me to photograph them emphatically stated that they were part of Anonymous, but did NOT - I repeat NOT - participate in the DDoS attacks. Make of that what you will, I am grateful they had enough trust and courage to face my camera.

The Charles Parsons II

Recently released by British Police, I now have the rest of my images back from a Greenpeace action photographed more than a year ago. The original action concentrated on the energy company EON which was planning to expand its coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth. Back in June 2009, Greenpeace boarded one of their ships, the coal freighter Sir Charles Parsons in the Thames Estuary to protest the delivery of coal to the Kingsnorth power station. My photos were seized from a team of runners who were transporting the memory cards from our inflatable boat to a location on land from where they were to be transmitted to the news media. Click here to see the first blog post from June 2009.

Subsequently, the company has abandoned plans to expand the plant late last year. Anyway, here is a small set of the remaining pictures from the last Greenpeace action at the plant: