The Coop's Rhythm

I was channel surfing Friday night and happened upon VH1's Best Week Ever show. If you've never seen the show it is sort-of a TV version of the gossip blogs with comedians giving commentary. Every week, the show picks someone who is having their "Best Week Ever". At every commercial break they show a couple of pics and say "one of these people is having the best week ever". The person that shows up during every commercial break is who they've picked and sure enough on Friday's show Anderson's pics from PIP kept popping up so I couldn't wait until the end of the show to see why they thought Anderson was having his "Best Week Ever". The clip did not disappoint. Sheryn graciously uploaded it for all to enjoy.

A Rebel with a Cause! His Own Guns! Tight Black T-Shirt! More Delicious than a Pic-i-nic baskets! Not an Inconvenient Truth!...Too funny but my favorite bit has to be when Jessica St. Clair talks about how cool he walks and wonders if his ear piece plays Staying Alive when he walks or maybe he has his own "Coop's Rhythm" internally. Hmm...

Back in March, Charlie Moore blogged about their PIP visit to Brazil and all the ailments the crew picked up including Jeff Hutchens, the Getty Images photographer who ended up with a parasite in his leg. The blog Photo News interviewed Jeff about his year-long adventure with CNN. Below are some highlights and the full interview is HERE. If you click on the polar bear pic next to the full interview you'll see 27 different pictures he took while covering the PIP filming. Jeff also blogged HERE about some of the photographs.

While the same reporters and crew didn’t make it to all 13 countries, Hutchens traveled with the group to all but Greenland and the Carteret Islands.

Living conditions in Brazil were anything but glamorous; luckily Hutchens knew what to expect and had brought a hammock along on the trip. It wasn’t only the living conditions that made things uncomfortable. While in the South American country, Hutchens picked up a parasite that took four doctors and two and a half months to get rid of.

“I just really loved the creative freedom that I was given on this project,” he said. “That’s what really makes a photographer happy, no matter what the conditions are.”

“For a few nights, the places we had to sleep were so foul in some ways that I ended up stringing up a hammock between two land cruisers [in Chad]”.

The crew slept in a variety of environments depending on location. From living in tents in Madagascar to a plush luxury hotel in Bangkok, after long tiring days, Hutchens found a way to sleep just about anywhere.

“I got to hold a baby polar bear which is probably the coolest thing I’ve ever done,” he said. “I was holding this 25 pound baby polar bear that basically started snoring in my arms.”

He said that one woman the group spoke to was a widow whose husband died while living in a “cancer village,” which was polluted by a Chinese mine. “It can be fairly sobering to see those things personalized,” Hutchens said. “Any time that you see any level of human-controlled suffering, it’s always hard and it always hits you in some way.”

“It’s disturbing in general to see global impact on a very practical level and to see very distinctly, areas that are being absolutely affected by it,” He said. “The biggest thing was in central Africa, really looking at the water shortage there in general and how different climactic factors are effecting that. To see how people are trying to cope with that.”

All PIP images © Jeff Hutchens / Getty Images