Write a personal blog on an earthquake where thousands have been killed. Spot the contradiction there… but here goes - how the earthquake in Sumatra affected me.

So usual drill (1) Get a call. (2) Pack my bags, too much, too little, unpack, repack - I know I’m missing something. (3) catch a flight - London, Doha, Kuala Lumpur, Padang. (4) Take pictures. (5) Transmit pictures. (6) Repeat (4) and (5).

Directly from the airport I go to the local earthquake-damaged hospital. I see a grandmother comforting the bravest nine-year-old girl suffering from two broken legs. She reminds me of another brave little girl, my eldest daughter, 10 years old. Heartbreaking.

From there, I head to a hotel where at least 100 are thought to have perished. The smell hits you straight away. You know when you are ill and you can’t remember what its like to be well? The smell of death is similar to that. When you smell it you think you’ll never smell anything nice again. It’s distinctive and, of course, totally unpleasant.

Now how do you show death? Tough one. Although numbers are not yet confirmed hundreds if not thousands have lost their lives. A fundamental part of the story, no?

I do understand that people might not want to look at dead bodies as they munch their breakfast and read their paper or while they surf the net sipping on a semi-skimmed-decaf-mocha-cappuccino or whatever.
BUT our (my) job is to find ways of conveying the stark, tragic reality of what is happening here. The dead most obviously deserve the same respect the living do so, me, I go for details; hands, fingers, feet, hair, arms - elements that show the truth as subtly as possible. Things I find acceptable may not be to others. It turns out not all my editors agree with me on what is and what is not ok to show our global clients and readers. There is no right or wrong answer - just shades of gray in a world where nothing is black and white.

The evenings are spent crammed into a hotel room - last count eight sharing our space - very generously given to us by the owner who has moved himself and his family into the restaurant. There’s the ever smiling Enny Nuraheni, Chief Photographer Indonesia, the unflappable Erik de Castro, Chief Photographer Philippines, the scarily young Nicky Loh from the Taiwan bureau, Dadang Tri from Jakarta and finally Crack Palinggi; who has not been seen for days as he sleeps rough covering the story through the eyes of remote villagers. Anyway, we have water, electricity, a semi-decent phone line and I always pack music. Coltrane and Davis waft through the air; I hope the other guys and girls like jazz.

A couple of days into the story, it’s early morning and I’m hiking through the bush looking for a village which we hear has been completely destroyed by the quake. I’m hot but juiced and love the thrill of searching for the truth. Eight hours and maybe 15 miles later I’ve seen destruction on a biblical scale, I’ve stepped on something I can’t mention and have fallen into mud bath up to my proverbials. Luckily my pathetic appearance cheers up the homeless locals who are happy to find a light hearted sight. Let’s face it what’s more amusing than a foreigner draped in cameras and looking like he’s just done ten rounds with a wild boar fighting over a clump of mud?

Despite the mudslide destroying nearly all their village and maybe 300 of their neighbors losing their lives they all still take pity on me. I’m offered their precious water to clean up, I’m offered their scarce food, and a place to rest. Their generosity is simply heart warming.

The get-up, get-over-it and move-on way in which the people of Sumatra, who have lost so much, have dealt with this catastrophic earthquake will stay with me forever.

Reuters Sports Editor, Pictures, Greg Bos recalls covering the 1988 Lockerbie bombing in the following question and answer session.

What role were you in when the bombing happened?
I was working on the Reuters pictures desk at the time, but was also part of the rotation system we had - where photographers could go out and cover picture assignments.

How did you hear about it?
I was at home nursing a bad cold, when staff photographer colleague Nick Didlick called and asked if I could get up to Scotland asap. The company had arranged for a private plane to fly me and two text journalists from Stansted Airport to Carlisle on the Scottish border in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, Nick and fellow staffer Rob Taggert drove to Lockerbie through the night in the pool car with all the darkroom equipment. We arrived at Carlisle Airport at around 4:00 or 5:00am and I was told to stay put because a media helicopter was due to go up at dawn for aerial shots. I was the designated pool photographer on the first morning. However, it was a very foggy morning and I could not see any of the wreckage or the large crater. I remember the aerial pictures from the first morning were unusable. I was terribly disappointed after spending several hours in a freezing cold helicopter with blocked sinuses.

How long did you stay at the site?
I stayed at Lockerbie over the Christmas holiday period - about two weeks. Nick and Rob left before me, and I was later joined by staff photographer colleague Russell Boyce. We were housed in a hotel just off the main highway. They had planned to close for the holidays, but stayed open to accommodate Reuters staff and several other journalists covering the story. Everyday we would go up to the main crash site out of town and take pictures from a small church yard across the road. I recall it was very cold standing there for hours, snapping off a few frames at a time, or when something happened. The large crater was either off limits to media for awhile, or did not produce any new imagery. I was lucky - having the color camera in hand - when I captured the rescue workers carrying a body bag and walking past the wreckage of the cockpit fuselage. I believe at the time most of the other photographers were shooting black and white film. This image was published on many front newspaper pages in the UK and around the world.

What camera equipment were you using?
It was Nikon cameras and black and white film in those days - with some color film for big stories. It was quite a juggling act shooting color in one camera and black and white in another as there was always the risk you would miss something important that needed to be recorded in color. I even shot half a roll of Ektachrome transparency film - protectively - in case something happened to the color negative film we were using. I also had the misfortune of accidentally breaking a bathroom sink while I was tapping the air bubbles out of a stainless steel film development tank. The hotel owner was not happy about it, but Reuters paid for a new sink.

How did you transmit pictures?
We had two-wire connections to the land line telephone in one of the bedrooms - in which the bathroom was converted into a darkroom - and filed pictures using a drum transmitter. We printed pictures on 8×10 paper using a custom easel that had a white space for adding a caption. The captions were typed on sticky back paper using a portable typewriter. A black and white picture took about 8 minutes. A color transmission - of three separations (cyan, magenta and yellow) took about 7-8 minutes per separation - thus nearly half an hour to move a color project as it was called then. If the transmitted color picture landed on the picture desk in London with hits, often the whole process had to be repeated in order get the separation targets correctly aligned. It was a long cumbersome process that could keep a photographer up all night if the phone lines were bad. We also had to process a lot of film for clients such as the Washington Post and the New York Post. This was known as a ’special request’ and helped to generate a bit of extra revenue.

What was your emotional reaction to the disaster?
At first I was kind of detached from the whole thing - just concentrating on getting the right pictures to illustrate the story. But after I photographed a distraught and confused mother leaving a memorial church service holding the hands of several children and being monstered by a pack of Fleet Street photographers - then going to the site of the giant crater where the remains of some of the residents were never found - it really hit home what a terrible tragedy this was. In 1992 I visited the memorial plaque at the small church outside the village to pay my respects. The memories of covering the Lockerbie disaster are still with me today.

A woman looks at the main headstone in the Lockerbie disaster memorial garden at Dryfesdale cemetery in Lockerbie, Scotland December 18, 2008.  REUTERS/David Moir

David Gray recounts his experience covering the earthquake that devastated Sichuan province, China.

Before I start please spare a thought for the thousands who died when Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar and the thousands more affected by it, who have lost loved ones, their homes and their livelihoods.

For a news pictures editor in charge of Asia yesterday was a tough day. The death toll was rising steadily as the enormity of the tragedy slowly unfolded and we worked hard at getting pictures from staff and stringers. Handout pictures from pressure groups were scrutinized and checked for usage rights usage and potential bias. We had staff waiting at airports to speak to tourists who may have had images of the scene as the cyclone struck.

The day was a stream of planning meetings, coordination with text and TV meetings, safety meetings, negotiations with wide eyed tourists all believing they had shot a million dollar picture, editing and captioning the results, trying to find staff with the requisite experience for the conditions, stroking those who had volunteered but lacked the experience and speaking to the photographers on the ground (compared to whom my day was a walk in the park - no power, no water, no food was the least of their worries).

So what was all this stressing about? The bottom line is to tell the story, honestly, fairly and objectively so the rest of the world can see something of this disaster in one of the most closed and oppressively run countries in the world.

At the end of yesterday I went home believing that a caring world knew about what was going on.

Once at home, after explaining to my 12 year old son why so many had died in a cyclone, I browsed a few of the international news sites to see how the world was reacting to something I felt  was the most important news event of the day.

The first blog I read under a slide show of pictures on a major US news site read (I paraphrase as it has been removed now) “why should we care about this dirty little washed up country and who gives a damn anyway”

This comment on the blog chilled me, not because it was there but because it was supported by many other comments.

But I care and so do the team who will deliver today’s file and tomorrow’s. 

Am I just shouting into the wind? Should we all become wedding photographers?