Carneval Parade in Munich

A carneval group celebrates on their own wagon
Photo © 2007 by Mark Zanzig/zettpress

A beautiful dancer poses for the photographers
Photo © 2007 by Mark Zanzig/zettpress

One of the joys of being a press photographer is the variety of topics you actually get to see. Basically it never gets boring. One day it's a demonstration against the Security Conference in Munich, with all the grim faces from the participants and emotional speeches, and the next day you photograph - a carneval parade, where everyone is happy and relaxed.

While the photos of the carneval parade are probably more difficult to sell to the local newspapers (there were a bunch of colleagues with me, and the newspapers would print only, like, fifteen photos in total), it still was a very relaxed and nice shooting.

See all the photos at Zettpress

The leader of the 2007 carneval parade (r)
Photo © 2007 by Mark Zanzig/zettpress

A woman wears glasses saying "Kölle Alaaf" ("Hello Cologne")
Photo © 2007 by Mark Zanzig/zettpress

Munich - Demonstration against Security Conference 2007

A banner says "against folter and terror" at the head of the march.
Photo © 2007 by Mark Zanzig/zettpress

View from above on Munich's Klenzestraße on the march
Photo © 2007 by Mark Zanzig/zettpress

Participants of the march
Photo © 2007 by Mark Zanzig/zettpress

Yesterday and today there was the "Security Conference 2007" in Munich, and I did a few excellent shots from the demonstration against the conference that happened on both days. Fortunately, the demonstration itself was quite peaceful indeed, with only very few aggressive people in the crowd. No big riots as some might have feared.

Stay tuned. Right now I am sorting the photos, more to follow soon.

Blogger.com Trouble - Not Fun!

Just a quick note that Blogger.com (owned by Google) apparently can not fix their systems. For quite some time, since moving to the "new Blogger", I have been experiencing severe problems when posting to the blog and when viewing the blog. The blog system responds slowly, and most of the time some or all photos do not show up. Which is quite a problem if you run a photo blog like I do.

Soooo, I will now be looking at alternatives for Blogger as this is getting unbearable. Probably I will start running Wordpress from my own server.

I really am sorry for any inconvenience caused by this.

[Update] - I found this awesome post by Gregg Scott that is spot-on. But unlike him I won't wait another 187 days for the Blogger folks to fix their stuff.

First Press Conference - FC Bayern

Uli Hoeneß presents Ottmar Hitzfeld
Photo: Copyright © 2007 by Mark Zanzig/zettpress

OK, so I had my first official press conference. And it was amazing: about 80 journalists in the very small, confined press lounge of the FC Bayern München. Uli Hoeneß (left) presented the new coach of the soccer club, Ottmar Hitzfeld (middle). Hitzfeld has coached the club before, from 1998 to 2004 and is now going to lead the club through the rest of the German season, "hopefully getting a chance to win the title again". Bayern is #4 right now, and they miss 8 points to the leader, so this will be quite difficult.

The atmosphere was hot and tense, both Hoeneß and Hitzfeld were friendly yet professionally tight-lipped. They would not say anything bad about the former coach, Felix Magath, who by the way signed a contract with the struggling club HSV today.

Anyway, as this was my first offical press conference, I have never seen so many high-end cameras in one single spot (let alone such a small spot). Now I will go through the pictures and select a couple of them for Zettpress.

Photos from the press conference