Pulitzer prize winners 2008

The Pulitzer prizes were announced last night. Among the winners are Steve Fainaru, from the Washington Post, who receives the prize for International Reporting for his reports on private security contractors operating in Iraq. Also, Reuters Bangkok senior snapper Adrees Latif wins the prize for Breaking news photography for his images of Japanese video journalist Kenji Nagai being shot on the streets of Rangoon in September 2007. Adrees talks about how he got the images on the Reuters blog,

Knowing that hundreds of people were gunned down in similar circumstances in a 1988 uprising, I climbed an old crosswalk directly overhead, to get to one of the few spots offering a clear view… I had already locked on my 135mm lens and set my camera shutter speed to 1000, aperture to F/7.1 and ISO at 800. With the camera on manual, I wanted to stop any movement while offering as much depth-of-field as possible. Two minutes later, the shooting started. My eye caught a person flying backwards through the air. Instinctively, I started photographing, capturing four frames of the man on his back. link

Meanwhile Reuters staff raise a glass to Adrees. And here is an audiovisual version of how Adrees took the prize winning image.