2013: Moments in Time

'BBC London, 94.9.

'Fiona McKinnon has a travel update.

'Woolwich Ferry, that's not running, because of the fog...'

At the turn of the year, two residents of London's Vauxhall

found themselves at the heart of one of 2013's first big news stories.

I was just about to leave for work. It was about 8.00am. I just heard

this helicopter incredibly close outside my bedroom window.

I was in bed, just checking my phone,

scrolling through Twitter, and the next thing

I know is there's this helicopter overhead,

which is, kind of, unusual for that time of day.

It sounded really low.

Then, a really loud jet engine noise over the house

and a really loud, kind of, explosion that you really felt

in your chest.

EXPLOSION

Oh, mate, your car's on fire! Get out of the car!

Get out of the car, man, your car's on fire!

The men didn't know each other, but their instincts were the same.

I pulled out the phone and just took a quick video,

just to show what had happened, really.

I saw a huge fireball.

Just at that moment, I decided to take a photo of it.

'In the past few minutes, we've been getting reports

'that a helicopter's crashed in the middle of London.'

This self-shot image, which would be tragically echoed

at the end of the year in Glasgow, was just the start.

2013 was the year which put picture power in the hands of the people,

as never before.

It gave us the selfie - the ultimate self-shot, self-published image...

..the first official royal photo, courtesy of a proud grandad...

..and the moment the year's number one sporting hero

turned his back on the press, to give his fans the money shot...

..as well as some outstanding images

captured by professional photographers,

including the moment the world's greatest statesmen left the stage.

EXPLOSION

We'd see images created by witnesses to shocking events...

..by victims of them.

What this tells us is, in the worst situations, our instinct

is now to record it, to look at it, to capture it,

rather than to turn away.

And in 2013, we saw images created by those responsible

for terrible events on our streets,

alive to the propaganda potential of the hand-held camera phone.

SPEECH IS MUTED

And all shared, attached

and tweeted long before they could appear in newsprint.

With social media,

you take that snapshot, that moment,

You don't know the context of it, you don't know the meaning,

but it is already out there and people are consuming it.

There is a saying that Twitter is at its best for the five minutes

after a disaster and at its worst for the next 12 hours.

There is some truth in that.

I, Barack Hussein Obama,

do solemnly swear...

No-one could doubt that Craig Jenner's picture was the real thing.

As soon as it started appearing on the internet,

the Evening Standard knew they couldn't compete.

We're just getting pictures on Twitter this morning of those scenes

in Vauxhall, where a helicopter has reportedly crashed this morning...

We had photographers on the ground,

but by the time they got to the scene, everywhere was cordoned off.

We were obviously watching the Twitter feed,

and the picture came up.

The immediate impact was "Wow!"

I thought, "This ain't going to be bettered by anybody."

This was going to go on the front page...without question.

The powerful thing about this picture, for me, is the way it shows

something apocalyptic

happening on an ordinary London morning.

It's got this lovely blue quality to the picture.

It's a misty morning. People are just getting up.

It is still quite dark, there are lights on.

And then, right in the middle of this road outside someone's house,

there is a helicopter in flames.

It is like something out of a horror film, a nightmare.

Nic Walker's incredible video footage

also appeared on news channels around the world,

from Belarus to the USA.

REPORTER SPEAKS ESTONIAN

All this was conducted on the iPhone

in a Starbucks. That is really the true sign

of what social media's let us do -

it's let me take a video of a major incident

in the centre of London and send that to the world

from a tiny little device in my hand.

Neither excepted offers of payment, not wanting to cash in on a tragedy.

They were some of the first amateur news gatherers of 2013 to beat

the professionals at their own game.

'Emergency crews in south-eastern Australia

'are racing to contain bush fires, ahead of more very hot weather...'

On the other side of the world,

there were devastating forest fires in Tasmania.

'These outbreaks are an unpredictable enemy

'and can turn in devastating fashion on the whim of the wind.'

Grandparents Tim and Tammy Holmes

and their five grandchildren were forced out by the flames.

I looked up to the hills

and saw the flames licking over the crest of the hill.

That was a very memorable sight, one that I will never forget,

of seeing the air, just gas burning in the air, like a great gas burner.

The pictures taken on their mobile phone,

as the flames surrounded them, amazed the world.

Tammy said, "Nobody will ever believe what we are seeing.

"Take some pictures with my phone."

Thinking clearly under pressure,

She had placed her phone on the jetty, so it was above our heads

and I was able to retrieve it quite easily and take some pictures -

just stand back a couple of metres and take pictures of the scene.

And, you know, those pictures have told the story

better than I can in words.

Your first reaction is, "How the hell did they get THERE?"

And what would you do? It is like Dante's inferno. You think,

"Well, what would my reaction be?" They're in the water, but then what?

It makes you ask 1,000 questions.

You don't just want to vanish. You want to leave a record.

Maybe at some dark place in this man's mind,

supposing they had all perished,

perhaps the camera would have survived, perhaps these images

would have survived... like a message in a bottle.

Storm clouds were brewing over Rome,

when photographer Alessandro Di Meo's phone rang.

History was being made at the Vatican.

'Pope Benedict has shocked his closest advisers

'and Roman Catholics around the world

'by announcing his resignation at the end of this month.'

TRANSLATION: The Pope had resigned, and I had to rush to St Peter's.

At first, I thought it was a joke, but the agency

kept confirming it.

'Religious leaders across the world have expressed their shock'

and sadness at the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, who has announced

'he is stepping down because of his age and ill-health.'

TRANSLATION: When I go to do a job,

I think about the photo I would like to take.

And then it came to me.

I said to two of my colleagues,

"If it begins to rain and there is lightning,

"I would like to take a photo of it, because the news about the Pope's

"resignation came like a bolt from the blue."

THUNDER RUMBLES

TRANSLATION: For 40 minutes or so, I didn't manage to shoot any,

as it doesn't happen all the time.

I took a cloth to clean my lens and, while I was doing it,

a lightning bolt struck the dome. I missed it, but I kept trying.

Fortunately, some minutes later,

another hit the dome while I was shooting.

For some, Alessandro's pictures were too good to be.

With Photoshopped imagery everywhere in 2013,

was this just another fake?

TRANSLATION: My colleagues told me there were rumours on the internet

saying my shot was fake - that it was a photomontage.

At first, I found this funny, but after a while,

it began to annoy and upset me, because the shot had my name on it.

Fortunately, the lightning bolt was also caught on video,

silencing the sceptics.

THUNDER ROARS

TRANSLATION: There are so many photographers who work a whole life

and don't shoot a photograph as good as mine.

I'm 34 years old and I have done it.

For me, as a person of faith,

I am very happy to say that

that picture says to me, "There is a God - pay attention."

In Chelyabinsk, Russia,

further proof of the growing power of the digital lens in 2013.

A falling meteor, captured automatically by dashboard cameras

installed to foil corrupt traffic police.

Photographed by many people,

the photographs are immediately shared all over the world.

They are transmitted all over the world.

You are no longer in the world which we were

throughout much of the 20th century, when different parts of the world

were divided and closed off from each other.

'He's in a different league and only...'

In 2013, we would see many famous faces going to court.

But nobody's fall from grace was more dramatic than Paralympic hero

Oscar Pistorius.

'Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius is charged with murder,

'after his girlfriend was shot at his home.

'He was arrested in the early hours of the morning

'and will appear in court tomorrow.'

A hero, who had gone against so much adversity,

standing in court. This is a new adversity.

You are trying to get your head around it - What happened?

What is he thinking? What is his father thinking?

What is the family of his girlfriend thinking? What's happened?

Chris Harris, a staff photographer with The Times,

had taken this famous picture of Nelson Mandela leaving jail in 1990.

In February, he had another national hero in his sights,

but this one was heading the other way.

It almost never happened, though.

Cameras are often allowed in South African courts

before the judge enters, but there was a problem.

I phoned, as soon as I got to the court and said,

"We are on time, but the bad news is,

"I don't think I'm going to get in."

It was absolutely packed with journalists.

Undeterred, Chris Harris stood on a chair,

which he requisitioned from inside,

and poked his lens up against a window.

He just wanted to cry his eyes out.

His face, kind of, screwed up, as though he was about

to burst into tears. No tears came.

He just looked forward and pushed his hands over his eyes, like this.

It seemed that the realisation, everything that had happened,

caught up with him. That was the moment, for me.

In most UK courts, an artist can only

sketch defendants. South Africa's more liberal policy allowed us

a privileged insight into the drama of the courtroom.

The image of his father reaching out to him

and Oscar not actually reaching back,

or leaning towards his father, is very painful to watch.

Anyone who has been in a situation where their child may have fallen,

the instinctive reaction of a parent

is to help them back to their feet and to put their arm round them.

And the picture almost screamed out and said, "Don't help me."

In March, the news media and a politician were on a collision course.

'Chris Huhne and his ex-wife are to stand trial

'charged with intending to pervert the course of justice.

'It's alleged Mr Huhne, a former Energy Secretary, persuaded

'Vicky Pryce to take penalty points after he was caught speeding.'

Justin Tallis is a veteran of the courtroom scrum.

I got down here and there must have been 50, 60 photographers,

plus television camera people.

And there were also quite a few protesters here.

'Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce.

'For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer,

'in sickness and in health. And soon, in prison.'

The original crime was a speeding offence.

But the former minister then lied to the police, to his family

and to us.

His wife initially backed him up,

but after he had had an affair and dumped her, she took her revenge.

It was a downfall the British people would relish,

and the press had to prepare for it.

I saw if I could come in from the side

I could maybe get a media picture of media here, photographers,

TV camera people, and Chris Huhne walking here.

The two slowly got closer together, but because of the protesters

and the size of the press pack, the media slowly came to a stop

cos we couldn't go any further, and Mr Huhne kept walking, until...

There's a thousand emotions that that picture and his stern reaction to it

elicits, and that's why that picture is very powerful.

If you're trying to be provocative, and we are in our

"Hello, world, wake up, look at these stories,"

then that's a very, very powerful image, because it's already telling you

a thousand things before you even bother to read the first six words.

I think a good picture usually encompasses

as many elements of the story as possible.

So if you look at the picture you have a camera on the left,

which... The story is about a speed camera.

You have the police officer in the middle

and the issue is with the law here.

And then you have Mr Huhne, with a crooked nose -

a politician who's done wrong, on the right-hand side.

You can spend all day waiting to find a picture.

You can show your selection to the editor, and say

"I'm happy about this" or "I don't think I've got THE one image,"

but that came in...I don't know, say half 12, one o'clock in the afternoon -

instantly, you show it to the editor,

you know that your job's done for the day.

As a man of faith, as a man who preaches peace and tolerance

it would be completely unbecoming for me to say,

"Chris Huhne, you completely deserve this." So I won't.

(Chris Huhne, you completely deserve this.)

Jail wasn't the end of it.

Both Huhne and Pryce would be caught by long lenses

as they saw out their sentences in open prisons.

They protested that their privacy had been invaded.

The Press Complaints Commission disagreed and the pair were accused

of using the media when it suited them, and crying foul when it didn't.

In April, terror struck the Boston Marathon.

And in its wake came serious questions about social media.

EXPLOSION, SCREAMING

I turned, and I had no idea what it was.

I mean, you hear a loud explosion like that, it rocked everything.

I didn't know if it was fireworks that went off,

if it was like... Some people were saying, maybe like

an electrical box exploded or something like that - you never think terrorist attack.

That's never your first thought.

21-year-old student Dan Lampariello tweeted a picture which alerted

many around the world that something terrible had happened in Boston.

I took out my iPhone and just started taking pictures.

There was white smoke just billowing up over the buildings over there,

and I just started taking pictures of it.

I took one photo, and to tell you the truth I just turned and ran.

Often, the most powerful pictures of terrible events

are those which are taken from a distance.

If you're up close at the heart of this, the horror is overwhelming.

There's all these people there watching a racing event,

and there in the background people are dying and being...

Their lives are being changed for ever.

It's very haunting.

Dan's picture had an electrifying effect on journalists everywhere.

I was in the newsroom, and it was a reasonably ordinary night.

And then my Twitter feed lit up like a firework.

There's a saying in that when a light goes on, when a signal goes off,

you immediately see it,

and often that's true with Twitter.

And immediately Boston was firing down my timeline

and firing through my Twitter, and immediately I knew there was a story.

Dan's picture appeared to show a mysterious figure on a rooftop.

It was just one example that led to feverish speculation online,

resulting in many people being wrongly accused.

And tragedy would follow.

There's a saying that Twitter is at its best during the five minutes

after a disaster, and at its worst for the next 12 hours. And there's some truth in that.

An awful lot of people becoming internet detectives.

And they started to make their own theories up -

they saw a guy with a rucksack, they saw a dark-skinned guy,

they saw a guy walking in a different direction.

The instinctive reaction of course was to racialise this issue,

was to say, "We are looking for brown-skinned bombers,

"we are looking for ethnic minorities. We're looking for Muslims."

Self-appointed cyber detectives singled out Sunil Tripathi,

a 22-year-old student who'd been reported missing before the bombing,

even though he had no connection with it

and had never been under police suspicion.

After his body was found in the Providence River,

many believed he had killed himself

because he'd been wrongly identified as a terrorist.

The news-sharing site Reddit apologised for its role

in the online witch-hunt -

even though nobody could know for sure if the two events were connected.

With social media, you take that snapshot, that moment.

You don't know the context of it, the meaning,

but it's already out there and people are consuming it.

What will be interesting is the consequence of that further down the line,

that we now have access to a jungle of information

and pictures all the time, and I do think that in the future

there will still be a need for a trusted hand-holder to take you through,

to tell you what you need to know, what's important,

this is the context... and get you through the jungle.

Some news events and long planned for,

but can still throw up surprising images.

'Baroness Thatcher, Britain's longest-serving Prime Minister

'of the 20th century, passed away this morning following a stroke.

'There'll be a funeral at St Paul's Cathedral

'with full military honours.'

The funny thing about Margaret Thatcher's funeral was that

in a way the emotion was quite unexpected.

So many images stay in my mind.

I was just a couple of feet from the aisle

so I saw the funeral procession go past very, very close.

Prince Philip, with a glassy stare ahead of him,

just a tiny drop of moisture on the end of his nose.

The Queen, bird-like, looking around, very, very observant,

taking everything in.

BELL TOLLS

But who would have predicted which pictures would be the most talked about?

We're all watching it on TV,

and halfway through the service the camera panned round

the people who were in the congregation, and there's George.

And someone shouted out, "He looks like he's crying."

And so we rewound the video, went back and noticed that he was.

We don't do this this often at the time, that's a grab off moving footage.

So the quality's not great, but it's enough to actually show that

he IS crying, and basically that's how we got it.

We nicked it off the BBC!

The great thing about that picture is, "Really? He's crying? Good grief."

And you just think... Then it's powerful.

It becomes a talking point, and you could put that in any newspaper,

any magazine, on TV...

You could put it anywhere, because it's a talking point, because you think,

"But I didn't think British politicians showed emotions.

"Especially not men. And him?

"Why is... Look, he's crying!" That's a talking point.

I'm not altogether surprised that the image made the news,

because it's quite a thing to see a Chancellor,

who has to be a fairly unsentimental man, with a tear in his eye.

I thought it was rather good for George Osborne

because one has to see him as a bean-counter, that's what Chancellors are supposed to do.

But to see him just as caught up as everybody else in the emotion -

well, it humanized him for me and I think for a lot of other people too.

There were others who were more cynical.

Who will win? That's the big question.

Olivia Colman is up for a couple.

CHEERING

If she doesn't win, there'll be tears.

She's sort of like George Osborne, isn't she? Yeah.

Except she's good at something and people like her.

LAUGHTER

When I saw the picture of George Osborne crying, I was incensed.

This is the man who has presided over welfare reforms

and cuts which have devastated the lives of people,

and I'm not sure if I've ever seen any public remorse

for any of those things - however, when Maggie died, he's crying.

Some speculated that it was bad economic news that brought a tear to his eye.

But his own account was straightforward.

JOHN HUMPHRYS: 'We did see you weeping at the funeral.

'Huge amount of coverage of that, of course.

'Well, I was caught on camera, so I can't deny that it...

'No, no, but I just want to...

'Yes, I welled up a bit, because I thought

'it was a very emotional and moving occasion, and at times overwhelming.'

INAUDIBLE UNDER MUSIC

May saw the camera phone used to shock, as a propaganda tool.

An off-duty soldier was targeted on a South London street.

One of his killers wanted to record a justification for their actions

and instructed a man on his way to pick up his children from school

to take out his smartphone -

and all the while, holding a bloodied meat cleaver.

The only reason we have killed this man today

is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers,

and this British soldier is one - it is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

There is a man in the middle of a very ordinary part of London,

with blood on his hands and a knife in his hands.

The shocking element for me was that this was something that

you would normally associate with Afghanistan or possibly

the Middle East, and this was happening in Woolwich.

There's a woman pushing a shopping trolley

almost past this guy during part of the footage.

The guy who took that picture,

I think an awful lot of people put themselves in his place.

A man with a knife and blood in his hands

tells you to take his picture, you're going to do it.

The sight of somebody not only covered in blood,

but audaciously standing in front of somebody who was filming it,

and talking about politics and talking about

a potential justification for that act,

I think is something... We've never seen anything like that before.

The next day,

most newspapers had this image from the video on their front pages.

It was an incredibly powerful image on the front page of our paper and

pretty much every other newspaper and every other news organisation.

Was it right to run it so prominently?

At The Guardian, many readers and staff thought not.

We had an awful lot of reaction to that picture and some of it was bad.

A lot of the criticism seemed to be that readers didn't expect that from The Guardian.

At the Mirror, the editor had no qualms.

This was a horrific story, but a story that had to be covered

and if you're going to cover it properly, then,

unfortunately, sometimes news is bad, news is horrific, news is awful

and sometimes images are.

But that's not a reason to shy away from using them,

if it's the right thing to do.

Clearly, in this case, you have to think about the family of the

victim, you have to think about children looking at the newspaper.

I am a father myself, I have two children. They saw it. They read the story.

The said, "Oh, my God, I can't believe that."

But they didn't say, "Why did you put that on the front page, Dad?"

But although attacks on mosques grew, Mo Ansar, who offered himself

as a moderate Muslim voice in the wake of Woolwich, agrees with the decision.

I think the media were right to publish the pictures.

I think some of the reporting around some of these news

stories need to be more measured in the future.

I think when we look at the ethics of media reporting it is vital

that we report these kinds of things. People have a right to know.

The need to know. The need to see these things.

On the 20th May, a tornado struck Oklahoma City.

And while the news helicopters excelled at showing

the scale of the devastation, it took this picture to

remind us of the power of still photography.

One of the things that a real photographer can do, and that this picture

does so greatly, is actually put in motion.

It is not just a dead lens taking the picture, it is not the machine taking the picture,

it is a human being taking the picture

and the mark of a true photographer, artist, with a camera, is that they

can actually express feeling in the way they take the picture.

In April, a garment factory collapsed in Dakar, Bangladesh,

killing over 1,000 people.

But it was not until May when this picture emerged of teenager

Reshima Begum that the story made the front pages.

She had been trapped for 17 days.

When they pulled Reshima out of the rubble,

suddenly this story became about a person.

We were able to identify with someone,

we were able to feel the pain and suffering of somebody

and I think if it wasn't for Reshima,

and others who were pulled out of the rubble at that time, I am not sure

whether that story would have had the same impact on us as it did.

Ninth of June, Mayfair, London.

A freelance paparazzo all goes by the name Jean-Paul was

driving past Scott's restaurant when he spotted a celebrity couple sitting outside.

When I take pictures of celebs they never know I am there.

I am always in the car, very still, really unassuming. Never on the pavement in their face.

No-one knows what I look like, I don't want them to know I am there,

because if they do, they act differently, they behave differently

and the pictures are not genuine.

A picture of chef Nigella Lawson and her art collector husband at their

regular table would not interested newspaper editors or their readers.

But what he saw next most certainly would.

I saw by now that Charles Saatchi had his hand around her neck.

Was he explaining something to her?

I did not think it was anything unusual

till I saw him do it again.

This time, I caught his hand up against her throat.

Jean-Paul took more than 350 photographs,

he knew he had something special. And he knew who to take them to.

An old-fashioned Sunday tabloid, looking to exploit

the demise of the News of the world.

The word was that The People were looking for a big splash,

they had a new editor and were going to relaunch. They needed a massive scoop.

It was a flagging newspaper, most people thought it had folded.

It was my first week on the job and our picture editor

was given from paparazzi a set of pictures halfway through

the week for a Sunday paper, knowing that there was a new boss

who would need to be impressed.

I was given a quarter of an hour to make our minds up

and I had to go down with the begging bowl to make sure

we had the money to do that, to management.

In my first week, I thought I would probably get away with that, and I did.

£16,000 was the sum she extracted from the bosses.

Arguably a bargain, given the picture's impact for the paper

and Mirror online.

On day one, we were up to about ten million page impressions

and by day two, it was over 30 million people had come to look at those pictures.

And you think, "How did 30 million people know?"

They are in America, Canada, China,

people coming from all over the place to look at these pictures.

Charles Saatchi, who accepted a police caution, said the images

were completely misleading. Much to his anger, Nigella stayed silent

and the couple divorced just weeks later.

Those pictures would be back.

The waiting is over! Andy Murray is the Wimbledon champion.

Andy Murray's relations with the media have never been warm.

And whether by accident or design, at his moment of triumph

at Wimbledon he turned his back on the ranks of professional

photographers and faced... an IT consultant from Surbiton.

You can see that he is just, kind of, amazed by it all

and then he just really starts roaring at the crowd.

Chris has his wife to thank for a still that had

the professionals cursing.

My wife thought, "Let's take the camera." Often it is

one of those things where you forget to take the camera.

It was only after he got home that night, he realised what he got.

We started looking through the shots and I was amazed by the pictures,

really, I thought, "Wow, these are... Did I take these?"

Amongst the celebrities in the Royal box

were movie actors Bradley Cooper and Gerard Butler.

Seemingly excited to be at the biggest tennis match of the year,

the Hollywood stars, in coordinating summer suits, could not help

but take a selfie, a word many heard for the first time in 2013.

It all started with Facebook and everyone posting

images of their holidays and everything had to be fabulous.

And then, I think people realised that this whole, "My life is

perfect" shtick, was getting boring, so we then got the selfie.

It's given is a new glimpse of the lives of the rich and famous.

Even the Prime Minister. But we have all been in on the craze.

Silly, spontaneous

and always with an obligatory arm holding a camera phone.

More than half of us have taken one.

And a surprising number have taken a sexy one.

Uploaded to Instagram and other picture-sharing sites,

they say "Look at us, this is who we are

"and where we are and this is who we are with."

Editors at Oxford dictionaries would later declare "selfie"

the word of the year.

On the one hand, people are liberated by being able to control their own

portrait, their own image, on the other hand it makes you obsessed with your own image.

Everyone has their own Hello! magazine.

There's the sense in which you become your own public relations officer.

And whatever you go you are looking for the perfect selfie opportunity.

Things just become fake.

There was one image we were all kept waiting for that long glorious July.

For the world's media, this would be one of the most important

photos of the year. And one man would have a special role to play.

John Stillwell has taken some of the most memorable pictures

of the Royal family.

Not for him, the usual media scrum, this time he would rise above it.

When I came here I immediately thought if someone was in a very

elevated position in this building looking down, you would get a clean shot of the baby's face.

The only thing I worried about was the camera falling out

of the window, because there was a lot of press downstairs

and there would have been quite a lot of casualties if this had fallen out.

After an almost three-week wait, the royal couple emerged.

And four floors up, John went into action.

Once I got that picture of the entire head of him, that was great and then

I got Prince William with the profile of his face with his son behind.

Then I got all three of them and the Duchess waving,

so, I expected to get one or two good pictures but I got three or four.

But it wasn't over.

He needed to the send digital images out to his agency before his rivals below.

Card comes out of the camera, put into a card reader.

Put the pictures on the laptop.

As soon as they left in the Land Rover, the pictures went to my office within three minutes.

So within five minutes of that baby coming out of the door,

the pictures are around the world. Used in newspapers and magazines.

That's like scoring the winning goal in a cup final.

That's the only way I can describe it for a photographer.

This is the image that makes even the most hardened Republicans

start investing in the Coronation mugs and royal memorabilia,

because you cannot be cynical

when you see a young couple carry their newborn son the next day

into this pack of waiting photographers and show him off,

just in the same way as every couple would show off their baby

to whoever was there.

Four weeks later, Kensington Palace issued a press release.

When you get a note to say there's going to be a picture today

and it can't go out until midnight and you think,

you've definitely got your front page, that's great.

And it arrives and you look down and says,

"Taken by Grandad Middleton" and you just think "Oh, no!"

Everyone loves a baby, it is understandable,

I am not against it, but it all went wrong with this picture.

They could have had any photographer in the world take the picture

and, frankly, there is a sense in which they should,

because their job is to be glamorous, so, do that and be that.

-Be Royal.

-Fair play to him, he must have been so nervous taking it.

To get two Kings in the picture is not something you do every day.

That looks like a young nice happy family at it is a lovely picture and the dog is brilliant.

I can remember it clearly, it was the middle of August.

Normally known as the silly season, because nothing much goes on.

There was an editorial conference, normally about 20 people in there.

Picture editor put the pictures up on the screen and what is normally

quite a raucous event, conference, was suddenly incredibly silent.

On the 22nd of August, the Daily Mirror took the bold step

of devoting its front page to this scene of a sarin gas attack

on a village east of Damascus in Syria.

I walked out of conference

and physically started to draw the front page.

What was so striking about the picture is that it was a picture

of a number of dead children lying there,

but to all intents and purposes,

they didn't look like they were dead. They looked like they were asleep.

It's so powerful, because it's children and because we can

all imagine our children or our friends' children in such a way.

These kids looked like they were in bed,

they looked like they were asleep

and yet, they weren't and it was

stunning to think that this was happening in a modern world and using

dead people on the front page of the newspaper is never taken lightly.

The Mirror has a proud tradition of shock front pages

or even whole editions.

Because the victims looked so peaceful in this picture,

the headline had to be explicit.

I originally wrote a headline that was a lot softer, actually.

From memory, I think it said, "The Sleeping Dead,"

which is a very powerful headline, no question,

but what it didn't really do was get across really quickly

and really directly what we're talking about here

and that is dead children and chemical weapons.

And I think it was Peter Willis,

who's the weekday editor of The Mirror,

who said, quite strongly, "Now they're gassing children,"

and that's it - Now They're Gassing Children -

it was as simple as that.

How you make stories accessible to people are, "It could be me,

"I could be there," and the most important thing with Syria...

It's when you feel empathy with that picture -

that person in the picture, that person with just a dog,

that person in the devastation, that person hanging by their fingernails.

It's at that point that you get it and you understand,

cos it could be you.

The pictures helped keep Syria on the political agenda.

The Prime Minister recalled Parliament to ask for support

for military action in principle...but was defeated.

Assad agreed to take his chemical weapons out of use.

But the fighting goes on.

Lloyd Embley's decision was brave.

But, in hindsight, he knows it could have been braver.

I do have one regret and that is that I didn't have the conviction

to wipe out the entire front page.

Right at the top of the front page, there was a Simon Cowell blurb

and a Coleen blurb and, if I were doing it again,

I would have taken the whole of the front page,

I think that probably indicates how we possibly thought

it might impact on our sales.

Erm...

but...that's the regret.

NEWSREADER: The Somali militant group Al-Shabaab has claimed responsibility

for the attack on a shopping centre in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

The Red Cross in Kenya says at least 30 people have been killed,

including some children.

September brought terror to somewhere that was both far away

and yet, somehow close to home -

a shopping centre.

Goran Tomasevic has been photographing warzones

for more than 20 years.

But nothing he'd witnessed in Kosovo, Afghanistan,

Libya or Syria prepared him for what he saw at his local shopping mall

in Nairobi, Kenya, on the 21st of the month.

GUNSHOTS

Goran, seen here on CCTV, caught the moment

when four-year-old Portia Walton ran into the arms

of one of the rescuers.

The attack left 67 people dead, including six from the UK.

These set of pictures actually say a lot more than the words did on this.

Because you can't... You look at the images

and you realise this could have been you.

This can happen anywhere.

And the trauma and the pain and the children's faces

and just the sheer panic.

You can't say that in words

and that's why these pictures are so strong.

Terrorists understand the proliferation of images

and they understand, if they do something,

it doesn't have to be that big a thing.

So long as it's horrific, so long as it's shock,

so long as it's terrifying.

We all, in some sense, collude with it.

All of us.

From television companies and newspapers,

right through down to ordinary people who might take a picture,

camera-phone picture, or share a picture.

We can now feast on images as never before.

And terrorism is the dark side of that feast.

NEWSREADER: Police in Greece are trying to identify

a four-year-old girl with blonde hair

who they believe may have been snatched from her parents.

They found her in a Roma settlement last Wednesday.

In October, the Greek police began to circulate a photograph

of a blonde, blue-eyed girl known as Maria

they thought had been stolen from her parents.

The image reminded editors and readers how much the country hoped

another blue-eyed girl would one day be found.

Why we even looked at that story and, frankly,

we probably wouldn't have done

if it didn't have any echoes of Madeleine McCann.

It makes you think again about,

"Well, where do these little children come from? How did no-one notice?"

And that's the power of that picture because immediately you're thinking,

"There's something not quite right here, so I need to know."

NEWSREADER: The mystery of Maria has been solved.

The family of the blonde, Roma girl who's made the front pages

all around the world has been traced.

A DNA test later proved that the child was Roma

and hadn't been abducted, after all.

Her mother told reporters she had given Maria to another family

because she was too poor to look after her.

But with Roma scare stories at a premium,

that wasn't what the press wanted to hear...

and they largely ignored it.

NEWSREADER: Hundreds of thousands of people across the Philippines

have been forced from their homes by the impact of what could be

the most powerful storm on record.

Typhoon Haiyan flattened houses, brought down power lines,

and caused floods.

When Typhoon Haiyan struck the coast of the Philippines in November,

over 6,000 people were killed.

It was the worst typhoon in the country's history.

When The Times needed to decide what picture to put on their front page,

it was this photo of an unnamed boy that caught the eye

of picture editor Sue Connolly.

You should always look at the bigger picture

and that sounds a bit corny, but who is he?

Look at him, he's got a black eye, he's got nothing.

Look behind him - it's desolate, absolutely desolate.

Where's he going to sleep?

These are the questions that I'm asking

and I'm putting that picture on the front.

So, what are the readers asking?

They want to know who he is, you know,

and we did try and find him, but...

we couldn't.

But in this digital age, anything is possible.

After the photo appeared on an appeals poster,

an online campaign started.

A Dutch journalist, Wouter van Cleef,

tracked down the boy, with the help of Facebook users.

Joshua Cator is 11 years old.

When the storm surge struck,

he held on to a piece of plywood to keep himself afloat.

His mother and sister died, but his father survived.

You wouldn't walk past someone in the street and leave them lying there,

you'd pick them up and help them and that's what good photography's about.

It's that it explains it to you, it draws you in.

Makes you look at a picture, makes you think about it.

As the year came to an end on a busy Friday night in Glasgow,

the BBC quoted Twitter,

reporting a helicopter had crashed onto the Clutha music bar.

Ten people were killed and there were many more seriously injured.

A packed dance floor and a sudden impact from above.

An image that will live with many for years.

Sometimes news has to make you want to turn away,

sometimes news has to give you an uncomfortable truth

and sometimes news has to make you put yourself into a position

that you wouldn't want to be in.

And those pictures were exactly that.

A complete horror in a very ordinary situation.

Something that you wouldn't imagine would happen

has happened and that's what pictures can do,

that's the power of a news picture, it can put you in a place

where you don't want to be and yet you can't help but think about.

Also in December, those notorious pictures

taken outside a London restaurant were back on the front pages.

Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson, now divorced, appeared as witnesses

in the prosecution of two of their former assistants.

Lurid accusations have flown back and forth.

In court, Nigella Lawson admitted

that she had occasionally taken cocaine,

which provoked further speculation about the incident at Scott's.

But both she and her ex-husband

deny they had been arguing about drugs.

She said he had reacted to a remark about wanting grandchildren one day.

The last image of the year dated back more than two decades

and showed the outstanding impact

Nelson Mandela made in life and in death.

HE SPEAKS AFRIKAANS

NEWSREADER: Nelson Mandela, the father of modern South Africa

and the country's first black president, has died.

He was 95.

Regardless of who took them, international news crews

or the people who came to pay their respects,

these pictures paid tribute to a man whose image remains

the most enduring of our times.

Only his death could bring so many of the world's leaders

and celebrities to one place

and yet mean so much to millions of us in all corners of the globe.

It was precisely because he could admit to imperfection.

Because he could be so full of good humour, even mischief,

despite the heavy burdens that he carried

that we loved him so.

There was even time for a frivolous moment

that would no doubt have drawn out one of his famous smiles.

On Sunday, the 15th of December,

South Africa's father of the nation was buried in his village of Qunu.

As a year that brought a civil war abroad and terrorism at home

came to an end, his message of hope and reconciliation

had never been more needed.