The scene is from World War 2 and the location is Brest, France. What you’re seeing is a long exposure of the tracer bullets and heavy artillery/antiaircraft fire that was thrown into the heavens at the attacking Royal Air Force. Thin lines are tracer shells while the thicker lines are heavier guns meant to blow bombers out of the sky.
The camera is mounted on an unknown British aeroplane, looking down at the factories and buildings of Brest below. Like I said, utterly hellish. [In Focus]
Bruce Bradford
Monday, July 18, 2011 at 9:33 AMI took one look at this and thought it was a cracked / deeply scratched iPhone 4 screen – similar to Gabrielle Lee-Scattello’s iPhone 4 after he left it on the roof of his car and drove off in true cocky style.
nitestick
Monday, July 18, 2011 at 12:22 PMI thought it was the web of a drug addled spider at first glance: http://www.trinity.edu/jdunn/spiderdrugs.htm
Anon
Monday, July 18, 2011 at 1:03 PMIt’s almost certainly a lot worse than you think.
Note that it’s very likely that the ratio of tracer rounds (that are visible in the picture) to normal rounds (invisible at night) is in the order of somewhere around 1:5.
Meaning that for every white line visible (the tracer rounds) there’s probably five times more death in the air that’s not able to be seen.
It’s almost beyond belief that people could encounter this sort of thing during the war, live through it, and thence expected to go back to ‘normal life’ and operate like not much ever happened.
This sort of thing is the reason that I dislike seeing the devaluation of words like ‘brave’ and ‘hero’ and ‘hardcore’ when they are used in reference to activities that are patently not even close.
Horsey
Monday, July 18, 2011 at 6:29 PMIt is not unlike images captured inside the Large Hadron Collider. Worlds within worlds…