It was day two of the bridge collapse story in Minnesota. Our photographers Scott Cohen and Joshua Lott were on-site and filing pictures. Reinforcement was on the way. Through You Witness News, a contributor-based site within Reuters.com, the Global Pictures Desk in Singapore received pictures from Tony Webster of the search-and-rescue work around the collapsed Interstate 35W bridge.

They were strong and compelling images that had all the news elements: submerged cars in the muddy Mississippi River, smashed chunks of concrete, mangled steel cables, emergency rescue personnel and divers searching for victims. We just had to use them! Tony’s images would nicely complement the Reuters picture file. With pictures from other news from the day streaming in (U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s trip to the Middle East, the Korean hostage situation in Afghanistan, the South Asian floods that have killed scores of people), sub-editor Charles Pertwee was tasked to select, caption and file Tony’s pictures to our clients. Through Charles’ edit, Tony’s pictures scored the front page of the International Herald Tribune (IHT) and appeared on msnbc.com.

Here are Charles’ thoughts behind his edit:

“The photo that was picked up by msnbc.com and the IHT was pretty much the first one that I picked and edited that evening from Tony’s website. The initial edit is usually done while looking at the images as thumbnails. If an image looks good as a thumbnail, if it’s easy on the eye, it will probably work at any size. In this instance, the image jumped out as it had some strong lines running through it, and it felt well composed and balanced.

When working on a story like this, you are instinctively looking for all the elements. In this case, the wreckage of the bridge, some cars, the river, and people to give some human scale to the destruction. It was an overcast day, which was quite fitting and added to the sombre mood as the rescue workers went about their business. In fact, Tony’s editing was pretty tight and most of the images on his site were usable. He gave us verticals and horizontals to work with, which is important as we need to give our clients the choice of either format. He also gave us access to the completely untouched full resolution files so we had plenty of room to crop if necessary, although quite a few did not need cropping. I noticed that during the second edit, our U.S.-based editors were pulling out some great crops that I had not even seen because they were only a small proportion of the original image. And the quality was holding up!”

If you witness a newsworthy event and have your camera with you, the key to emulating Tony Webster’s success is to send your pictures quickly to our You Witness News editors at pics@reuters.com.