A Thousand Words

In the Seattle Times today were a pair of photographs of an Israeli missile attack on Gaza. These are striking photographs, and I find myself wanting the entire story behind them. You can do a lot with photographs these days, especially digital, and I'm curious to see what the raw images look like. Not that I suspect that anything funny has taken place, but because once cropped and aligned, the photos are different than they were when they were first taken. Was the photographer snapping these in a hurry, wanting to capture what was happening while moving to cover? Or was he confident that the missile would land far enough away that he wouldn't be injured? Was he holding the camera in trembling hands, relying on shutter speed and film sensitivity to freeze the action and eliminate blur, or was he solidly set up on a tripod? Was he close to the action, as the photos suggest, or was he a distance away, using a massive telephoto lens to bring the events closer to a safe vantage point?

While a picture is worth a thousand words, it's sometimes the ones you can't hear that are the most compelling.

The captions given here are the ones from the paper's website.

Photo Credit: MAHMUD HAMS / AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Palestinians run as a rocket falls at them during an Israeli air strike on the Hamas Executive Force building in Nusseirat refugee camp in the centre of the Gaza strip, Friday. Warplanes pounded the Gaza Strip for a ninth day as Palestinians continued to fire rockets into Israel despite a call from Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas for a truce.

(Note: I'm inclined to say that the incoming ordinance is a missile, possibly a Hellfire, rather than a rocket.)

An Israeli misslie strikes amongst Palestinians during an attack on Hamas's Executive Force building in Nusseirat refugee camp in the centre of the Gaza strip, Friday.