"Always see them to the car…"
Not every job can be as glamorous as going to the Carterets in PNG, sometimes the job is closer to home such as the pic above, from this morning’s birthday celebrations for Emperor Akihito of Japan. I’ve never been to these before, every 23rd December I’ve managed to be elsewhere, and I’ve always missed the 2nd January event when the Imperial family come out to wave to greet the New Year. So this year I decided I’d make the effort and toddle along, photograph it for a client back in the UK, and to shoot some stock and just see how it is.
It wasn’t bad for pics, if you worked hard enough there were a few opportunities and options, Emperor up close (on a long lens, about 400mm), Princess Masako is worth a pic or two, a wide shot with crowd cheering and flag waving, and of course this standard shot above which tells the whole story. I imagine if you’ve worked in Tokyo many years as a press snapper then this would be another ‘boring, done it before job’, but for me it was new, and quite enjoyable, painless really.
Biggest problem of the morning was managing to photograph through the green tinted bullet proof glass, which was also shiny, and in the morning high contrast sunlight it nicely reflected all the trees, sky etc….Made it a bit tricky, you had to choose your angle.
The Emperor appears three times, at roughly half hour intervals, so it gives you plenty of chances for images and to move around and try different angles and lenses. One thing that surprised me was that many of the Japanese press photographers left after the second appearance. It struck me as odd as to wait for the third appearance would have been only another 25 minutes. So why leave? I appreciate these guys were working for news agencies and therefore speed of transmitting images is everything, but it did cross my mind what would their agencies think if the Emperor was assasinated on the third appearance, and they had all already left?
Many years ago I was in Cuba photographing, and I had the fortune to hang out with renowned photographer P.F. Bentley. At that time he had just finished following Bill Clinton on the election trail and had brought out a book of the images. One line of wisdom I always remember him telling me, when we discussed photographing personalities and politicians and the likes, was “alway see them to the car….”. Meaning, if you’re following Bill Clinton, for instance, don’t let him walk out the hotel and you stay inside the hotel, go with him, you see him to the car in case someone tries to assasinate him between the hotel lobby and the car, and then you watch the car leave and round the corner in case it blows up on the way.
(Such as happened in the kitchens of a hotel to Robert Kennedy, when he was shot dead, and Scottish photographer Harry Benson was there to record the moment.)
So today as the many photographers left, and I remained to photograph the third and final appearance of the morning by the Imperial family, those words went through my head, as they have done from time to time over the years. “Always see them to the car..”. Always see the job to the end. Probably nothing will happen, and you just get some more photos from a different angle, but then, sadly, you can never tell in this world.
