Your most DANGEROUS photographic moment

hughitb said:

Ah, it was nothing as dramatic as I was implying We visited a place in Southern Lebanon where some rather gruesome events happened back in the 90s. We were hanging around outside when this man approached us and started chatting in a friendly manner. He was spinning this whole yarn about having lived in Australia for a long time and he was just back. He was then asking us all about where we were from, and what we were doing in Lebanon, who we knew here, etc etc. We had a friend from the Irish army with us who was incredibly rude to the guy, and ushered us quickly into the car and away. We were a bit annoyed and asked why he did this. "Don't talk to those guys" he said "Syrian secret police".

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My experience with the Russian interior forces was different. A friend and I were shooting in an area with a couple of old power stations with many interesting views. Two people in ordinary clothes walked up to us, showed their IDs and asked us to follow them into a building. We had not noticed the very small sign prohibiting photography. Then we were interrogated by uniformed and armed staff. It was scary to sign the protocol without knowing the language too well, and also that they wanted to keep my passport. My friend, stupidly enough, tried to "buy" us free. The reply: "-We are not ordinary police!" In the end they let us go after we had destroyed the films. Finally, we asked were it was allowed to make photos "-Kreml"

In fact almost anything in Russia (read Moskva) is prohibited from photographing. Exception is notorious KGB prison, Ljubljanka.

haris said:

In fact almost anything in Russia (read Moskva) is prohibited from photographing. Exception is notorious KGB prison, Ljubljanka.

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Ljubljanka is prohibited - I know that as well from my own experience!

My most dangerous photographic moments seem to happen in camera stores, with my pocketbook as the potential casualty.

Probably when I told my wife I was getting up to go out and shoot one early morning. She could have killed me, it was our honeymoon after all.

In June 1991 year and a half after the fall of the communist regime in Romania, I was taking a photography workshop in Bucharest with two American photographers Tina and Kevin. Don’t know their full name but they were very anxious to put together a traveling exhibition in the USA (New York, Chicago). It was about people’s reaction to the changes in our society, civil unrest because power was stolen by pro-communist elements of the former red party; in other words street photography at its best. Danger was everywhere and I remember the day when this photo was taken it was announced on radio and TV that massive number of miners were descending to Bucharest to “protect” the president and the pro-commie government by the thousands of protesters on the street. Our American friends decided that we have to go out and cover this event so we showed them around and somehow protected them of clashes with the miners. At the end of few days of devastation, the army pushed back the miners but many people have been injured and important buildings were damaged. Out of many pictures I shot that day I like this one the most (Who, me?).

JBrunner said:

My most dangerous photographic moments seem to happen in camera stores, with my pocketbook as the potential casualty.

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Especially since they can now connect your wallet [read: credit card] directly to the computer!

Steve

Mihai, that is a beautiful picture!

I photographed my wife first thing in the morning once. A mistake I'm not apt to repeat anytime in this lifetime I'll wager.

Other than that, I got nothin'.

silveror0 said:

...Then the pilot explained, “I had to do that maneuver because I had insufficient power with that load to climb over the ridge and did the dive to gain air speed while turning to go down the mountain’s slope – and there wasn’t time to explain.”

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Great story. I have known pilots who'd relish the opportunity to perform that stunt.

I had the opportunity to photograh (for Pacific Northwest Magazine) and fly with Lana Kurtzer (the seaplane base on Lake Union in Seattle), who, with my own father, had operated an instrument flight school on the Yakima River in Sunnyside, at the beginning of WWII. My dad had damaged a pontoon and wouldn't let Kurt report it to the insurance company, insisting on paying for it himself. He had bumped into a rock. To land, they had to fly over the bridge and under the powerlines. Pretty tight.

Kurt's license was signed by Orville Wright. He showed me his huge box of logbooks and told me some stories - notably one about landing a plane that was on fire on the beach over near Longbeach, holding onto a passenger who was trying to jump out. At 90 years old (which was when I flew with him) he could only get insurance from Lloyd's of London, and subsequently, even they declined to cover him, at which time, he promptly died.

Nothing really dangerous, I think, but years ago while still in Italy, a "poliziotto" (cop) friend of mine asked me if I could take some pictures of a the body of a tourist from Yugoslavia who had been killed in a car accident.

When I got to the mortuary one of the workers took me to the room where the body was.
The room was completely covered in cold grey marble. One one side I could see three "beds" also in marble and the two at the extremities had 2 bodies covered by white sheets, the one in the middle was empty.
In front of these beds there was the body of the tourist in a wheeled bed.
I needed a vantage point so I decided to step on the unoccupied bed so that I could take a good picture of the unfortunate tourist.
As I place my Nikon FM2 to my eye I hear the sound of the door closing shut .
I take my eyes off the camera and I see that that guy had left the room and I was alone with these bodies.
I was thinking at the possibility of me loosing balance and falling on one of these bodies and who knows in what conditions they were?
My thoughts were rapidly freezing me and my imagination was running wild: at some point I thought I had seen the creases of one of the sheets move.
I took the shots as rapidly as I could, jumped off the bed and I ran through the door.
On the other side was waiting for me the world of the living and I was glad it was so.

I'm currently working on a project involving what they call in these parts "Bous al Carrer" - meaning "Bulls in the Street" in Valenciano, the local language. Some of these "bulls" are actually cows and really not dangerous deliberately, but some are real malevolent monsters weighing 500 kilos whose sole objective is to pierce the hide of the nearest human with their brutal horns.

I've had several near misses, but this one springs to mind particularly. He came at me much faster than I expected and I only avoided obtaining an extra orifice or two by performing what I can only describe as a perfectly graceful swerve of the hips - at least that's what it felt like to me! - and swift use of the first heavy weapon that came to hand, i.e. the Leica M6ttl I took the picture with. I brought the camera down hard on the top of the beast's head and he took off after the next foolhardy idiot running down the street. I was left standing in the middle of the street, blinking at the quickly receding rear end of the bull, slowly realising how close I'd come to a nasty moment, when I noticed I was being applauded by the locals around me! Apparently they were impressed with my technique.

Oddly enough I felt quite safe visiting a minefield being cleared by InterSOS. This picture was taken in Sarajevo. The gentleman is probing the ground for mines, which they have to do by hand, every inch, over the whole area. InterSOS were so well prepared and so careful that it didn't feel like a dangerous operation at all.

Cheers, Paul.

In telling my tale I’m cheating a bit, as I was out scouting photo possibilities sans camera when it all happened. My trusty Kelty held the usual backpacking kit.

It had been a lovely fall day. We’d had a string of such days with no rain and nobody expected any.

Under those conditions I decided to make camp in a small canyon, usually a no-no. There were a few pools of old rainwater scattered about. They were perfect mirrors such that, while gathering firewood, I saw reflections of pink clouds drifting in a sunset sky. A profound peace pervaded the canyon.

Suddenly all around me loud sounds, “thwack!, thwack”! I hadn’t reckoned how narrow a window of sky there was above me, so my first thought was that someone was pelting me with stones.

But it was suddenly dark! And the stones were hailstones like golfballs! With a sickening feeling in my stomach I recalled a vital clue. Several hours earlier, at a high lookout, I’d seen thick black clouds over Jericho 10 miles to the north. We so rarely get localized thunderstorms that it simply hadn’t registered as such.

Was I in for it! Winds picked up so fast I barely had time to toss my stuff into the pack before it all blew away. Also, lucky for me, I’d worn a stiff leather hat that protected me from the hail. The fury of the storm was astonishing. When hail turned to rain, I knew the only way to go was up. There were shelves in the canyon wall—finding the trail was impossible—but the rock was so slick I could only climb so far. Finally I chose to face the inevitable flash flood rather than risking broken bones or worse. I unrolled my foam pad for a rain cape and hunkered down on a rock shelf.

This terrific storm raged for over an hour. Suddenly spouts of white water burst over the canyon walls. And then I heard it, thunder of a different kind. And then I saw in the repeated flashes of lightning great foaming fists bounding down the canyon, bashing one side and then the other: the flood!

When the flood reached its peak the rock under me trembled. In another stroke of luck, it came within only two yards of my feet. That is a an experience you *never* forget.

The final twist came later. Around midnight placid skies again reigned. The Israeli air force went into action dropping flares. Katyusha-sized flares! The idea was to help lost hikers, but I was not lost; I was in fact happily bedding down on high ground. One of the flares as well as its chute malfunctioned. It came whistling down and exploded fifty feet away, very loud indeed, but it had fallen on the other size of a large boulder! Then at last peace and sleep came.

I was living in Louisiana and shooting a lot of sports freelance in the 80's. I had the opportunity to shoot an LSU-Notre Dame Football game in Baton Rouge. At Tiger Stadium the stands come straight to the ground, it's not built up six feet like at most stadiums, so the poor slobs shooting video and film have to kneel. It was muddy on the sidelines, so we were all filthy. One play unfolds and I think it's Harvey Williams, the running back who gets the ball, and he's coming straight at me.

Now when you're on the sidelines, you kind of have a self preservation timer that tells you when to get out of the way and mine seemed to be working fine. I was getting what I wanted and Harvey was filling the frame, and it was so close and so sharp that I could see the texture of the mesh on his jersey. The timer clicked and I thought to myself, "I need to move, now." So I turned to do so. Unfortunatly there were two rows of kneeling photographers behind me and there was nowhere to go. I turned back to the action, just in time for 220 pounds of running back to slam into me on national TV. Fourtunatly it was muddy and nothing was broken, including the Nikon. Harvey was ok too.

I had a camera on the table in front of me, but thankfully had the sense not to use it, when I realised while sitting in a bar in Budapest that the guys at the next table were Russian Mafia.

They were a pretty promising subject, sitting there around the table looking a mixture of grim and relaxed, but my sense of self-preservation inexplicably kicked in.

The most dangerous situations in which I've actually taken photos are probably while road herping. Lots of instances of pulling onto an extremely narrow shoulder of the road, then running around on the road itself, on blind curves on narrow desert highways in the middle of the night. In theory someone could always come careening around the corner before I could get the subject and myself out of the way, but so far my number keeps not coming up.

Rattlesnakes are one of my favourite subjects, so I'm rarely surprised by them, and I've gotten pretty good at managing them safely. Not something to get overconfident about, though.

-NT

Herps are far more predictible than humans...

Vaughn

You want danger? I'll bet nobody can trump these crazies (skip to about halfway through if you're impatient):

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1058989/paris_crane_pushups/

MurrayMinchin said:

The ocean, however, just doesn't give a damn about you or anything you want to do, and can snuff you out if you let your guard down.

Murray

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The ocean, my working environment..... as an underwater photographer I'm always in danger. Running out of air or a gear malfunction could be the bends at best, or worse..... nothing like having to bring your own life support system with you when your working.

The worst time was one day in the Coral Sea..... a few hundred miles off the great barrier reef I was swimming with some pilot whales when they turned and went off a different direction. I then noticed 3 Oceanic whitetip sharks underneath the 3 of us snorkelers. As the other 2 were shouting for the boat to come pick us out of the water I'm head down in the water taking pictures of these sharks circling us. When I looked at them later the sharks get bigger in each frame. When the zodiac showed up the other 2 guys were out of the water faster than I could get the camera strap off my arm. And yes I still have my legs, though my wife jokes that I could have had nice shots of them removing my feet and legs if I shot pictures a little longer.