All photos © Adam Lau

Crew members brace themselves on the bow of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society ship, MV Steve Irwin, as it plunges through Antarctic swells. Adam Lau, a student from San Francisco State University, documented the ship and it’s crew as they pursued and clashed with Japanese whaling vessels. Such ships are accused of hunting commercially under the guise of “scientific research.” While Sea Shepherd claims to be non-violent, its aggressive tactics have provoked criticism from other groups, making it the black sheep of the conservation movement.

Lau’s series is included in the PDN Photo Annual 2010 online gallery. The MV Steve Irwin and it’s crew are also the subject of the Animal Planet series Whale Wars.

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© David Aaron Troy

A retired fireman taking one of the fire station’s antique trucks out for a drive, Hagerstown, Maryland.

David Aaron Troy, a commercial location photographer, travels in search of discovering that “authentic moment” that binds us all.  He’s currently working on his first exhibition of portraits of Mennonites who live in southern Pennsylvania.

© David Bowman

Pictured here is an image from David Bowman’s Ice Culture series. He says, “In the dead of winter, when Minnesota becomes the land of 10,000 frozen lakes, the ice racing season begins. A temperature in the 20s is perfect winter weather. Any warmer and it starts to melt. Any colder and it hurts. Dry snow crunches under your feet. Your hat and jacket feel like pajamas; boots fit like slippers. Your car becomes your sled.”

© All photos by Chris Hondros/Getty Images

Among the photos readers of PDNOnline voted as among the most influential photos of the decade was this series taken in 2005  by Chris Hondros as he accompanied a US battalion in Iraq. Below, Hondros shares the story of what happened after the images were published around the world, and the fate of the boy injured in the incident.

TAL AFAR, IRAQ – JANUARY 18, 2005:  US Soldiers with the 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the 25th Infantry Division out of Ft. Lewis, Washington approach a car while a wounded boy tumbles out after shooting it when it failed to stop and came toward soldiers despite warning shots during a dusk patrol  in Tal Afar, Iraq.   The car, which held a frightened Iraqi family, was riddled with bullets and the mother and father were killed.  Their five children survived in the backseat, one with a non-life threatening flesh wound. (more…)

© Getty Images/photo by Spencer Platt

This image by Spencer Platt, winner of the 2006 World Press Photo of the Year, was named one of the  most influential photos of the decade by readers of PDN. (For more on PDN’s Visions of the Decade, see PDN’s January issue.)

The photo’s caption reads, “Affluent Lebanese drive down the street to look at a destroyed neighborhood August 15, 2006 in southern Beirut, Lebanon. As the United Nations-brokered cease fire between Israel and Hezbollah enters its first day, thousands of Lebanese returned to their homes and villages.”

The image excited a lot of controversy. Says Platt, “While most of my images from this war showed dead, crying or displaced Lebanese, this photo shows them as resilient, beautiful and seemingly impervious to the Israeli bombs.” Some people believed it showed  callous tourists viewing devastation; Platt says he’s seen several stories speculating about the subjects, including one claiming they were actually poor Lebanese who happened to find themselves in a sports car. In February 2007, PDNOnline published an interview with the subjects. They said they were residents of the formerly Christian neighborhood in the photo but  had been forced to flee the bombing; at the start of the cease fire, they drove back to check on their homes.

Says Platt, “What matters is that this image could not be taken anywhere else in the world except Lebanon. There is nowhere that fashion, carnage, war and beauty rub shoulders as they do in Beirut.” He adds, “A red Mini Cooper driving through the rubble with a group of glamorous youth looking perplexed and slightly indifferent…that is a picture….nothing more need be said.”