Beirut Blast courtesy of Nabih on Twitter
Toronto. For years our thirst for social media images has decimated the numbers and profits of serious professional photographers. The value of these ‘amateur social media’ recordings changed shortly after the huge blast on Beirut’s waterfront. On August 4th, 2020, world wide news stations and papers reported the massive explosion. After much speculation, it turned out to be caused by incorrectly stored ammonium nitrate.
A few months later, on November 20th, 2020, Jaron Schneider reported on Petapixel the article written by Andrew Liszewski for Gizmodo called, “Forensic Experts Used Photos and Videos From Social Media to Reconstruct Beirut Explosion“.
The Forensic Experts used readily available stills and short videos on social media to create the time line of the explosion in perhaps a first for crowd sourcing images and video clips to reconstruct an historic event.
My thanks to past president, author, and sports photographer Les Jones for sharing ths amazing source with us.
