It has been an incredibly busy year. Multiple trips to Sudan and Kenya, covering a war in Ivory Coast and of course, the conflict in Libya.

At the amazing ancient city of leptis Magna

I returned from Tripoli three weeks ago and have been rushed off my feet with my personal life and making plans for the future. This is my last year as the BBC Africa Bureau Cameraman and I have enjoyed every minute of it (well nearly). At the end of this year I return to London to work for the BBC there. I’ll still be travelling but will have a world wide remit, not just Africa. It should be an exciting new challenge.

I’m not going to write a long post on my most recent trip to Libya but wanted to post this ‘authored’ film I made at Leptis Magna – the ancient city on the Med

And I wanted to share this little snippet that I filmed of Libya’s latest tourist attraction, the Bab al Aziziya, which was Gaddafi’s old compound. It is fascinating and well worth a visit.

I also spent time at Bani Walid, here’s one of the pieces we made.

The trip had a bizarre and slightly scary ending when my friend and colleague Andrew Harding fell ill and was rushed to hospital. You can listen to his report on From our own Correspondent here.

Filming Soldiers in Abidjan, April 2011

My first book is ready! “Lensman: working as an international news and documentary cameraman” can now be downloaded from my other website www.imagejunkies.com. It was great fun to write and I hope it gives you an insight into the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in international newsgathering.

I know there are the odd typo but – its free!

Sections include:

- Starting out, strategies to get your foot in the door

- The personal qualities and attitudes that are needed to progress as a news and doco shooter

- The kit that you will need

- The importance of understanding video editing

- Visas and paperwork, the dull stuff nobody warns you about

- War zones

- Embeds with the military

Basically the book covers everything I wish I had known starting out many years ago.

If you want to download it then please click here and fill out the subscriber form. Once you have clicked submit you should receive an email from imagejunkies – just follow the links and download the book. Anyway i hope you enjoy it and please do get in touch and let me know what you think.

South Sudan celebrates independence

I was lucky enough to be in South Sudan for the birth of the new nation on July 9th 2011. It was a wonderful experience and I decided to document a little of what it was like to cover the story from the Cameraman’s perspective.

I hope you find the short film an interesting and enlightening look at what goes into the making of a News film.

Thanks to my colleagues Correspondent Will Ross and Producer Gringo Wotshela for allowing themselves to be filmed.

For the techies out there I shot it on my Sony HX9V and cut it on FCP 6. I also used Quick looks for the opening and closing shots.

If you want to watch the actual main preview piece we made for the BBC Ten o’clock news then check here

With Rebels in Misrata

In May myself and Correspondent Andrew Harding went to the besieged City of Misrata in Libya. After a long journey we finally arrived and in the course of a week there we made four films that ran on the BBC News. Here are two of my favourites that I wanted to share. Cheers, Chris.

A thirty five hour journey on the deck of a Fishing boat. . .

The fishing boat, rocked gently. Slowly, very slowly creeping across the gulf of Sirte from benghazi to Misrata. I stood at the bow and enjoyed the last moments of a dizzyingly beautiful sunset. “The Captain thinks there might be some Gaddafi ships approaching” said Kev casually. He was our Security advisor and had spent years in the SAS. He isn’t perturbed at the thought of a shoot-out. I, on the other hand, am a natural born coward and I felt my stomach turn with fear.

We watched the boats gradually move closer until, reassuringly, it became clear that they were actually NATO warships. “Allah o Akbar” shouted the crew and our handful of fellow passengers. Bakr patted me on the back and gestured for me to join in. “Allah o Akbar” I said waving at the Helicopter that now passed above us fast and low.

There was little to do during the thirty five hour journey but sleep and talk. I became friendly with Bakr and his fellow fighters who were returning to Misrata to continue the fight with Gaddafi’s forces. One of them had been in Turkey receiving treatment for war wounds. Despite the language barrier I felt a strong bond with these guys and enjoyed our conversations that usually amounted to little more than them telling me “Gaddafi bad, NATO good” and “God is great.”

Enjoying the sunshine onboard ship with the Captain

Eventually we reached our destination. The City of Misrata had been besieged for over two months. Hammered relentlessly by Artillery and rocket fire, Boats were the only way in. The docks were surprisingly quiet, I had expected chaos but they were almost ghostly in their silence. We hitched a lift into town and found accommodation at a bizarre Spa and physiotherapy centre – setting up our beds on massage tables in an abandoned first floor room.

Click here to view the first of our films from Misrata

Quickly we went to Tripoli Street, the heart of the City and scene of some of the bitterest fighting. The destruction was immense, whole office buildings blackened from fire and scarred by multiple shell strikes. Bullet and shrapnel marks crisscrossing the brickwork. In the market were the shattered and smoking wrecks of three T-72 Tanks which I was told were knocked out by guys with Molotov cocktails. I imagined this was how cities looked after the fighting in World War Two.

The people of Misrata are keen to welcome foreigner journalists, they want their story to be heard. As soon as we appeared anywhere people would approach and ask if there is anything they can do to help us.

We find a group of fighters BBQ’ing in the court-yard of a near-by building. They look battle hardened, heads wrapped in Shemagh’s, AK-47′s piled against the wall. But immediately they smile and welcome us offering a slice of Camel liver which I gladly take and enjoy. It’s hard to believe that just weeks ago most of them had never even touched a weapon. They are happy, Gaddafi’s forces have been pushed out of the city and with NATO air-strikes to back them up the fighters are confident that they won’t return.

Taking a break in the ruins of Tripoli Street, Misrata. . .

At the new front lines we meet Ibrahim Al Halbous, a scrap-merchant turned Rebel Commander. He runs a tight outfit and we are told by our local Fixer that his men were some of the biggest heroes of the battle. He looks the part, stocky and handsome with a commanding voice. I’m impressed to see that he has look-outs posted all around and “Madmax” style armoured Pick-up trucks protecting his flanks – clearly a lesson learned the hard way.

Here is our film from the Frontline

Misrata is slowly now recovering, shops are opening and the electricity is now on for a few hours a day. It’s been an intense and fascinating assignment and I hope that our films have helped to show the world the strength and pride of an amazing city.

The team and I with the Rebels in Misrata

The smell of decaying bodies is a tough one to forget. I’d seen dead bodies before, but not in the number that they littered the battle zones of Ivory Coast. My colleague Andrew advised me to breath through the mouth – easier said than done.

The town of Duekoue had just fallen into the hands of the troops backing the elected President of Ivory Coast Alassane Ouattara – a masscare followed. It’s hard to say exactly who killed who and why. All sides have been pointing fingers and no one can decide how many bodies have actually been found. I arrived with my team a few days after the event, the first foreign journalists to make it this far west, past the dozens of check points that line the road from Yamoussoukro. Luckily there was a big UN presence and as soon as we arrived in our beaten up Toyota 4×4 the Moroccan UN troops took us to see the bodies being collected for burial.

The dead were everywhere, covered in black plastic by the side of the road. I jumped out of the car and began to film. I worked on instinct, trying to not to think too much about what I was seeing. The sound of the bodies being loaded onto a flat bed truck seemed incredibly loud in the heavy, eerie silence. They were handed up from the ground and then slid across the metal floor before bumping to a standstill.

A Moroccan Officer reprimanded a group of Ouattara soldiers at a nearby check-point – “No more killing” he told them angrily. They looked sullen, denying any responsibility. I just kept filming, sucking the images into the camera, hoping that by documenting this I was somehow making a difference, telling a story that needed to be told.

That night the Moroccan troops allowed us to use there officers mess in the UN base as an edit suite and a place to sleep. They looked after us well, bringing us coffee, bread and even a plate of Arabic sweets. They were good guys, eager to help and not upset by us taking over the one place where they could come to watch the football and forget where they were.

This was my fourth trip to Ivory Coast in the space of a year. My first had been fun, a football film in the run up to the World Cup. But quickly things had deteriorated and the last few trips had all been to document the countries gradual journey towards war. Abidjan had been a terrifying place for foreign journalists since the incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo had refused to recognize his election defeat and in January my team were stopped and threatened with death at a particularly nasty check point.

In recent weeks the forces of Alassane Ouattara had swept through much of the country and had advanced deep into Abidjan itself. Just getting in to the country to cover the story had been a huge effort. We had flown to Bamako in Mali and driven for nineteen hours to get to Bouake, the capital of the northern portion of the country.

After filing our film on the massacre in Duekoue we headed towards the front line in Abidjan. The road towards the city was deserted, market stalls that would normally be sprinkled along the route, abandoned. Finally we came across the main staging point for Ouattaras soldiers at a Shell Garage in an area called Gesco. We found hundreds of fighters exhausted and sprawled in any shade they could find as they tried to sleep. We advanced further along the road, more bodies littered the route, rotting and covered in maggots. Civilians brave enough to venture out looking for food and water were so terrified they had they hands raised in surrender the whole time – even when being interviewed by my team.

That night the film that we made was the lead story on the BBC Ten o’clock News – we’d finally helped people notice this story and how important it was.

Abidjan was so dangerous that it was impossible to go any further into the city. In a deeply cynical move Laurent Gbagbo and his surviving die-head fighters had turned the city into a charnel house, a place of death, where everybody was a legitimate target. We tried to arrange a military convoy to take us to the Golf Hotel where President Ouattara had been based for months, protected by the UN. Thirty seconds after we left, we were forced to turn back when the fighters with us reported seeing wounded on the road and said it was to dangerous too proceed.

We spent five days on the edge of town filing stories. We stayed at a Bar/Guesthouse about twenty kilometers from the frontlines. It was basic, I shared a room with Correspondent Andrew Harding. The toilet stank, forcing me to hold my breath every time I went inside and the bed sheets were crawling with insects. But they cooked us an evening meal every night and had cold drinks – a welcome moral booster after filming in the sticky humidity of West Africa. Unfortunately one of my kit bags hadn’t arrived when we flew from Johannesburg to Bamako in Mali – it was the bag with my survival equipment. As the week wore on I missed not having a decent travel towel and sleeping bag and regretted the loss of my solar phone charger and water purification tablets.

Equipment was beginning to suffer from the heat and rough treatment. One of our BGAN’s stopped working, meaning we only had one to file both radio and TV. As I was filming one afternoon I noticed my lens was moving around in its mount. I kept tightening it with no improvement. Then the back focus started to slip substantially. In a panic I removed the lens and discovered that all the screws holding it together had worked there way loose and it was coming apart. I didn’t have time to fix it then and there and was forced to shoot one of our pieces on my Canon 5D Mark II. The picture quality of the 5D is fantastic but it was a relief when I was able to fix the lens with a screwdriver later that night. Returning to the ergonomics and ease of use I have with my Sony DSR 500.

Eventually on 12th April, Laurent Gbagbo was captured. We were in a town well north of Abidjan and were able to capture the amazing spontaneous celebrations. School children flooded into the street waving branches and singing while adults danced and pounded on car horns filling the town with a cacophony of noise. It was a brilliant ending to two challenging weeks. It’s been a hard time for Ivory Coast but I hope now things can slowly start to return to normal and that the healing can begin.

If you would like to use this article on your blog/Website then feel free. If you do so then please print my name, copyright notice and a link to my site at the end. Cheers

Shooting a PTC in Moscow - 2006

So after procrastinating for far too long I have finally gotten around to re-editing my Showreel. It includes a lot of work that has appeared on my earlier demo, but also has some new material. My theory with a Showreel for Cameramen and Editors is to forget making it too flashy, I hate lots of music and effects, preferring instead to see full sequences and stories well told. I hope you agree. As always feedback is much appreciated.

If you would like to use this article on your blog/Website then feel free. If you do so then please print my name, copyright notice and a link to my site at the end. Cheers.

So after five weeks away from the world of TV and journalism I finally returned to action with a frantic but excellent start to 2011. My first port of call was a steamy Abidjan in Ivory Coast. The city was on edge after Laurent Gbagbo refused to step down as President despite losing the election. The president elect, Alassane Outtara, was holed up in a five star hotel on the edge of town and we set off by road to interview him. As you will see from the finished film we made it, but had a had a scare at an Army roadblock. . .

Ivory Coast Roadblock from Christian Parkinson on Vimeo.

With the story in Ivory Coast on hold while International delegations tried to help, the team and I flew across Africa to Juba in South Sudan. It was a landmark moment as the people voted in a referendum which will decide wether South Sudan secedes from the mainly Muslim north. I love South Sudan and the people and I hope that this film we made captures the spirit and excitement. . .

Sudan Referendum 2011 from Christian Parkinson on Vimeo.

PS. . . I also got to meet George Clooney – he seemed a friendly, witty and well informed guy.

The team and I with George Clooney

Although I am keen to make my own tuition videos and inject my own experience and sense of fun into them I’m also aware that there are many good ones already floating around the internet. I believe that in all aspects of life you should play to your strengths, my strengths are experience in the real world, shooting in all environments and using a plethora of different equipment. I am though new to the HDSLR revolution and the rise of cameras like the Canon 5D Mark II. In this post I wanted to embed a few videos that I’ve have found to be really useful in setting my own Canon 5D and maximizing it to the best of its ability.

In the first one below, HDSLR guru Philip Bloom gives an impromptu lesson to a Cameraman whose Camera setting are all wrong. . .

In the next film Christopher K gives a good intro to the White Balance settings on a 5D. . .

And finally I found this video helpful also, especially as it helped me to change my menu settings to avoid automatic exposure compensation, which was becoming a real pain. . .

How To Use Video Mode on the Canon 5D MK II from Tyler Ginter on Vimeo.

If you would like to use this article on your blog/Website then feel free. If you do so then please print my name, copyright notice and a link to my site at the end. Cheers.

A couple of weeks ago myself and good friend Aulrich Market decided to put my new 5D Mark II through its paces. We got in touch with the Gauteng Spinning Association in Johannesburg and arranged to go and film one of their events. Aulrich took my Canon HV30 as a second camera and we had an afternoon of great fun making this short film about spinning (drifting).

If you would like to use this article on your blog/Website then feel free. If you do so then please print my name, copyright notice and a link to my site at the end. Cheers.