Earth Hour was held on Saturday evening at half past eight what results a characteristic series of photo pairs every year. Local landmarks with and without their beautiful night lights. This is commonly photographed by Hungarian photographers as well, but limited time and large space makes it harder to take a complex gallery if you shoot alone. Even publications that have enough photographers to mage a broader selection of photos rarely spend that much time and effort into making this type of coverage.

International news agencies however are a compeltely different cup of tea. Their colleagues can provide a much broader view of this type of event even if each photographer takes only one pair of photos in his/her county. One shot from each country provides a really nice selection from around the world. This is the selection from which Nicky Loh working for Reuters in Taiwan put together a really nice video. The nearly two minute video shows the Earth our blackout of famous buildings in sixteen countries – including the Hungarian Parliament too.

A global celebration of Earth Hour 2011 from Nicky Loh on Vimeo.

International Earth Hour or not, I don’t really find any sign of it on Hungarian news websites – neither series from the blackouts in Hungary nor photos from around the world.
To acompany the Reuters video of course there is a traditional gallery of the images too. And of course this gallery shows not only those places seen in the video but also some other places. Here are some of the international news websites showing these photo pairs:

• Earth Hour 2011 – Atlantic In Focus
• Before and after: Earth Hour – CNN
• Earth Hour 2011 – Sacramento Bee The Frame
• Earth Hour 2011 – Boston Big Picture
• Earth Hour – Reuters