Right Place, Right TIME, for an iconic moment

So there it is, the iconic, infamous or whatever you want to call it image of the pepper spraying at UC Davis. At the time I really didn't feel it was that great of a shot. My shutter speed was too slow. There was too much dead space behind the protesters. Part of the jacket of a girl to my left worked its way into the photo. When I got back to the office and put together a photo gallery I didn't even pick it as my lead photo. Boy was I wrong. Within hours this single image had more than three times as many views as our entire website gets in a day. And in the two weeks since I've had more people, friends, family, and strangers alike congratulate me on this photo than probably every other photo I've taken in my 13 years as a photojournalist.

Even though I usually reserve this blog for my photo adventures outside of work, I feel the process leading to and following this photo deserves an explanation.

My shift on Fridays starts around 2:30 and I had only two assignments on the books as I was getting ready to head in to work that day; a group of seniors using iPads to supplement their hearing aids and children making pottery at the Art Center for holiday charity sale. That was the normal, exciting stuff we get to cover here in Davis. Then Cory Golden, our UCD beat writer at The Enterprise, called to suggest we bring a photographer to the Quad within an hour to cover the Occupy UC Davis encampment. While I usually ride my bike to campus I decided to drive thinking I might have to speed over to the other assignments after this proved to be nothing exciting. I mention that because on my bike I usually have a big, bulky backpack for my gear but instead I was able to use a smaller shoulder bag that proved much easier to maneuver thru the crowds that eventually formed.

I arrived on campus just at the police chief was preparing to tell the protesters their tents needed to be removed in an hour or they could be arrested. Some of the students suggested moving to another part of campus, trying to stay one step ahead of the authorities and keep the movement going, an idea I thought sounded the smartest. Again, I was waaayyyy wrong. The vast majority wanted to take a stand there and prove their point. About 4 of the 29 tents were taken down, mostly because they were being borrowed and the borrowers didn't want them confiscated. As the deadline approached the scene became a little more frantic. One of the lead protesters was running around asking where all the media was. "You're looking at it" I told him. He didn't look too pleased. I probably should've told him The Aggie did have two photographers, Jasna Hodzic and Brian Nguyen, there as well.

News came in of riot clad officers lining up down the road and the tents were moved into the center of the quad. The protesters formed a human chain around the tents, ready to force the police arrest them if they wanted the tents gone. It was here I thought I had the shot.

It was one of the rare times when a fisheye lens perfectly matched the subject. I held the camera above my head in live view mode and composed a shot with the most passionate looking students in the foreground. With the nice color, soft lighting, and good subject and background composition it would have made great lead art for the Sunday paper. Then the police marched in.

Why they timed it around the hour when students would be filtering out of classes is beyond me. So as twenty or so officers with helmets, pepper ball guns, and batons marched onto the Quad the crowd of onlookers quickly multiplied. The student-police ratio went from 3:1 to probably 10:1 by the time they left the scene. Bad news for the police but good news for me.

I'm not the stereotypical shove-my-way-to-the-front type of photojournalist. So when the police line only covered one quarter of the circle of protesters I was able to set up at the end of their line and get both police and protesters in my photos. At first it seemed a bad move as the initial arrests were made out of my line of sight, including one protester who had to be carried out by his hands and feet. That would've made a great photo. As police moved into the tent area

the protesters at the back of the circle broke apart and allowed others to come in and take down the tents before the police could. With the tents coming down I figured the excitement was mostly over and moved around the crowd looking to get a final shot of the police leaving with their last few arrestees. I was wrong yet again.

The protesters, buoyed by chants of support from the growing crowd of onlookers, moved to encircle the officers as they had done the tents and force the police to make more unpopular arrests on their way out. The majority of the crowd filtered into the area the police had just vacated. I followed, too, and watched as one of the arrestees was led thru the crowd.

I mention this photo for two reasons. First off the officer's last name is Beerman and at the time I could only think about how much crap he probably had to put up with from drunk college students over the years. The second, which only became obvious in hindsight, is how easy it was for police to exit the circle even at the most crowded spot.

I noticed the lead officers were forming up on the other side of the group so I moved around to that side and positioned myself directly in front of the protesters.

During the whole protest I had been switching between shooting still photos and video. Just after I took the above photo I switched to video as Lt. John Pike approached the group in front of me and said something to the three men seated on the left.

You could see here how the officer's mood changed as the protester turned his warning into a joke. We're all human. We all have emotions. And the look on his face told me things were about to get more serious. A few more officers came in from behind me and I quickly tried to position myself in a spot where police wouldn't ask me to leave but I would still be close to the protesters who were blocking the walkway. This was a time when I knew I had to do everything I could to stay as close as possible to the frontline. I was lucky that the crowd control officer on my side, who was assisting from the City of Davis PD, was happy that I had moved back before he had to ask and so he let me to stay at the very edge of the path. I try to be kind and respectful as much as possible when I shoot and I really believe that mild attitude was key getting myself in the best possible spot to capture this moment.

The whole spraying seemed to happen very quickly. In unpredictable situations like that composing a photograph becomes instinctual. Looking now at the tilted horizon I think my thought was to have the protesters flow from the bottom corner and middle thru the center of the image and into the crowd with Pike as close to a rule of thirds position as possible while the other riot police filled in the top right corner. Really, though, I don't remember what I was thinking other than to keep shooting.


Two casual passes of pepper spray were followed by officers moving in to clear protesters from the walkway.

I liked the action of that photo better than the spraying. And as protesters were moved off the path I captured the photo I thought best summarized what had just happened.

I went low to try and show readers the protesters' point of view, blinded and helpless on the ground as the almost faceless riot police towered over them. The photo, at least so I thought, was much more dramatic and when I put together a photo gallery I initially chose this as our lead photo. I later learned it was the action, not the reaction, that had the most impact.
Another shot of the same protester having his face rinsed

With their path clear the police made their way off the Quad. Many of the students who had only been watching were now chanting against the police as well. I liked that it was a girl in a Raiders jacket who was acting as a barrier between angry students and the police.

It was here where I made another smart decision. I really wanted our readers to know these were real people in our photo. I snapped a quick photo of Lt Pike's name badge and Cory then confirmed with the Chief of Police his full name and rank. I found the protester who was face up in the spraying photo and had later been down pushed in front of me,

and as he was being led towards the waiting fire truck I said to him "I am from the Davis Enterprise newspaper. I understand if you do not want to be identified but it adds a human element to the ..." Before I could finish he replied "David Bucsho, B U S C H O." I immediately recognized the name. I had taken his photo just a week earlier when he and his girlfriend were volunteering to help restore the Domes co-housing. We had had a short but happy conversation at the time and I think that may have persuaded him to offer up his name to me. Both Fred and Sue, who had covered the protests earlier in the week for us, and the Aggie photogs had complained to me earlier that most protesters were reluctant to give their names to media. It was this tiny and very lucky little victory that gave me the most satisfaction of all the work I had done that day.

I went back to the office hoping to get up a photo gallery online before heading over to the UCD-Stanford men's basketball game. Just the previous week we had started having all editorial staff set up Twitter accounts to try and drive more traffic to the paper's website. The timing couldn't have been better. Though the only followers I had were other people at the Enterprise Cory had built up quite a following. After a brief discussion as to wether we should identify Lt. Pike (we decided to do so since he had a name badge that anyone could have read and the chief praised his work that day) I tweeted and Cory re-tweeted the link to the photo gallery.

I went off to the basketball game and got a couple of nice dunking photos of the Aggies. Of course the Ags were overmatched by the bigger Cardinal so these photos didn't tell the story of the game.

Since we don't have a Saturday paper I usually head home after late Friday night games since I can make a quick gallery there. But, curious about our new tweeting, I decided to head back to the office to check on the protest story and maybe add another tweet about the game. Cory was still in the office monitoring the growing amount of reaction to the pepper spraying. He said a big name blogger from across the country had already called the spray photo THE iconic image of the Occupy movement. And Dean Royal, our internet editor, said the photos were dominating our web traffic. I followed Cory's advice and changed the lead photo. We also discussed sending the photo on to the AP. But not wanting the Bee or Chronicle to take advantage of us being the only professional print media there we decided to hold it til Sunday. I completely forgot about the basketball tweet.

By Saturday a couple shaky videos surfaced on YouTube and helped the story spread across the world. As the main video racked up 100's of 1000's of views I began kicking myself for not shooting video during the spraying. Still captures from a good 1080p camera like mine would've been good enough for four column photos in the paper. I also regretted not shooting RAW and not minding my shutter speed as the sun was going down. Even worse I deleted probably a third to a half of my photos that night not realizing the magnitude of the story. So many things a professional like myself should have done better, not just in a historic moment such as this but in any shooting situation. To top it all off, my decision to upload only low resolution photos looked bad when an amateur photographer opposite my position put out a higher resolution photo and her image of Lt Pike became the one used in so many internet memes.

Soon I realized my decision to stick to stills was the right one. Fred had sent four photos to the AP on Sunday. I heard some had been printed in the Bee, Chronicle, and Seattle Times that Monday though I didn't get to see any of those. Then the following Friday I got a call from the McKillop family whom I had shot family portraits fora couple hours earlier. They had just received the new edition of TIME and told me I had a two page spread in the front of the magazine.

At first I didn't think much of it. After all I'd had three photos in my pinnacle publication, Sports Illustrated (even if those three combined were only printed about 4 inches total across.) And I'd already had a nationally published double truck spread in Volleyball magazine with this photo from the 2003 Volleyball Festival that I thought really looked like the work of a professional.

But I have to admit that when I walked into Newsbeat five days later and opened up the magazine to see it was my photo alone leading off their news section I was pretty jazzed. And when they emailed a few days ago letting me know they were going to use it in their Ten Best Photos of the Year edition the excitement really set it.

I still don't think the purely photographic aspects of the photo are all that good. But given the gravity of the subject matter and its effect on people in town and around the nation I guess it's safe to say this is my best photo yet. Yes Miranda, even better than Kitten Dexter in the bathtub