(Attempted) Citizen photojournalism
Today I was taking the Airport shuttle bus back to my place when I noticed a massive traffic jam on Wilshire Blvd, and some commotion in front of the Federal building. Though traffic on Wilshire can be bad, it's never this bad on a Sunday evening, so as soon as I got back I grabbed my camera and ran to the scene.
Apparently the local Iranian/Iranian-American community has been staging protests in front of the Federal building all weekend. It was really orderly, in fact. The crowd was peaceful and didn't block traffic, and mostly ended 30-45 minutes after I got there as apparently that's when their protest permit ended (the jam was probably because of the massive number of people crossing the street combined with the overenthusiastic supporters driving around in cars honking their horns).
Through chatting with some of the people, I was interested by the fact that a few of the protesters went above merely protesting election fraud, and were protesting the entire political system in Iran, which isn't very democratic at all. This seems to go beyond the protests in Iran, which I think only calls for the elections to be redone.
In any case, a mostly unedited sample of my photos can be found below. I discovered that I don't know my D40x as well as I should, and so wasn't able to really adapt to nighttime conditions.
http://picasaweb.google.com/publius314/IranianProtests#
Apparently the local Iranian/Iranian-American community has been staging protests in front of the Federal building all weekend. It was really orderly, in fact. The crowd was peaceful and didn't block traffic, and mostly ended 30-45 minutes after I got there as apparently that's when their protest permit ended (the jam was probably because of the massive number of people crossing the street combined with the overenthusiastic supporters driving around in cars honking their horns).
Through chatting with some of the people, I was interested by the fact that a few of the protesters went above merely protesting election fraud, and were protesting the entire political system in Iran, which isn't very democratic at all. This seems to go beyond the protests in Iran, which I think only calls for the elections to be redone.
In any case, a mostly unedited sample of my photos can be found below. I discovered that I don't know my D40x as well as I should, and so wasn't able to really adapt to nighttime conditions.
http://picasaweb.google.com/publius314/IranianProtests#