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 8x10 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

Pigeons create controversy among city dwellers whether they are being pilloried as “rats with wings” or celebrated as endlessly feedable feathered friends.

Through photographer Simon de Glanville’s pictures, viewers come eye-to-eye with the creatures.

Over the past 10 years, De Glanville has taken pictures of pigeons, squirrels and dogs for a project entitled “London Wildlife”. His favourite locations for photographing urban wildlife include London’s Peckham, Brixton and Chinatown neighbourhoods.

What is your opinion of pigeons? Do these pictures change your perspective on pigeons?

Access for foreign journalists to Asia's longest running civil war between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and government troops, is very tightly controlled by the Sri Lankan government. Getting near the front line area known as the 'No Fire Zone' is only possible with an officially sanctioned trip organized by the Ministry of Defence. Last Friday, April 24, I went on one.

The trip started at 3.30am, when I arrived at the military air base in Colombo. We went through 3 security checks, before boarding our plane at 6.30am. We flew north for about 30 minutes to a small airstrip at a place called Mankulam. From here, we boarded two Mi-8 helicopters. To avoid any ground fire, the choppers fly at maximum speed just above the height of the tallest trees, and when I say just, I mean scraping the leaves. This fast and furious ride lasted just 30 minutes to the town of Kilinochchi.

We had a quick briefing, and then we set off in a convoy of armored personnel carriers towards the front. The carrier that I got into was a very old, clunky thing of which there was not much evidence of suspension. The roads in the area had suffered 25 years of a civil war, and were in seriously bad condition. Myself and and a TV cameraman tried our best to grab pictures as we sped along at around 50 miles/h but we were being thrown around so much, even for me to get the camera up to my face and see through it, was near impossible. We held on the best we could, and I managed to get a few 'usable' frames of a scorched and destroyed landscape. Every single dwelling was either destroyed or uninhabitable. It reminded me of East Timor in 1999. Burnt out vehicles lined the road. What was most noticeable was the absence of people. There were simply no civilians anywhere.

After what seemed like hours, but was actually only one, we arrived at the destroyed town of Puttumatalan. Here we got into jeeps. The troops that were escorting us got noticeably nervous. They held their guns at the ready now, looking more alert and more intently into the coconut groves as we passed. We must be close now, I thought.

After about 20 minutes driving down a dirt road, we turned a bend. Suddenly, there were thousands of exhausted and weary looking civilians. They were being given small amounts of food and drink by the soldiers, but only enough to last them a day or so. This was when our escorts really started to hurry us. It seemed they didn’t want us to talk or view these civilians for too long, and after just 5 minutes, we were told to get back in the jeeps. Frantic calls were made on radios, and we were told we were now headed to the front.

In just under 10 minutes, we arrived at the place where just days earlier the Sri Lankan government soldiers had pushed their way through the LTTE defenses, leading to a mass exodus of civilians. Smoke billowed less than a mile away where, we were told, troops were continuing to fight. Being so close, our escort now numbered almost 100 heavily armed soldiers. We were severely exposed standing on a road that cut a path through the lagoon, but this was where we were allowed to stay the longest of any of the other stops.

For a full 30 minutes, we photographed and filmed what we saw around us. Clothes and rubbish lay scattered across the dry plain. While walking amongst all this, I found a packet of film negatives that showed mourners at a funeral. Sadly, it was rather an appropriate subject matter in such a place where so many had most likely died.

After driving back to the battalion headquarters, we were once again in an armored personal carrier, driving back to the helicopter landing area, with our driver narrowly missing 3 cows and even skidding off the road on one occasion. Once we boarded the helicopter, everything went so fast, and before we knew it, we were on our plane and heading back to Colombo. Stepping onto the runway, it dawned on me what I had just done. In a single day, I had been to the front line of a war in an area that is extremely difficult to reach and come back to civilization. I was exhausted and dripping with sweat, but what about the people trapped in the war zone? They didn’t get to fly back to the comforts of a city. They continued to endure the horrors of war in dire conditions and horrendous temperatures, with minimal food, water, medical aid or even shelter. What about those who got out, but had a long journey to a refugee camp ahead of them, with no clear idea when they can go back home. It reminded me of a book I finished reading a few months ago called ‘Dispatches’ by Michael Herr about his experiences as a correspondent during the Vietnam war, and how he found it strange flying in and out of war zones. I could see what he had meant a little more clearly now – just the craziness of it all.