Click to be a shooting star

At 2.42pm on October 11, Dean Collins heard a thunderous explosion as he worked at his computer in his 30th-floor apartment in Manhattan.

Collins looked out of his window and saw a small plane crashing into a building in front of him — the accident that killed New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle and his flight instructor.

Instinctively he pulled his digital camera from a drawer and started shooting, thinking to himself, "This is going to be on the news."

Collins, a consultant for a software company, had read about Scoopt, a year-old agency in Scotland that brokers photos for "citizen journalists".

Within minutes, he e-mailed his digital shots to Scoopt.

Hours later, his picture of a smoking Manhattan high-rise was in three British newspapers, including a front-page splash in the Times of London. He earned $650 (Dh2, 387) for his work.

Technology stings

The rapid rise of digital technology, which enables ordinary people anywhere to record images and post them quickly on the internet, is changing the way the world witnesses history.

Events that once were recorded only by human memory may now endure in full, pixelated detail, available in seconds around the globe.

The trend is driven by the proliferation of camera-equipped mobile phones, introduced in Japan in 2000. Worldwide sales topped 460 million last year and is projected to reach 1 billion by 2010.

With the proliferation of images, prosecutors are increasingly relying on photos as evidence in court cases. Insurance companies balance mobile phone photos against recollection as they assess auto accidents.

The presence of mobile phone cameras in handbags and coat pockets means that for the famous, private space is shrinking fast.

Scoopt has sold mobile phone photos of Michelle Rodriguez, star of the TV show Lost, partying wildly in a bar in New York and shots of Paris Hilton dancing on a table in Las Vegas.

Celebrities everywhere have been stung by stealthy camera phones. Grainy photos of supermodel Kate Moss snorting cocaine, shot with a camera phone, appeared in newspapers last year.

Britain's Prince Harry was forced to apologise when a fellow reveller at a costume party used a camera phone to snap the prince wearing a Nazi uniform and sold the photos to tabloids for thousands of dollars.

Digital history

Forty-three years ago, a single person with a home movie camera captured the only detailed images of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy.

If today's technology had existed then, hundreds of people with mobile phones and pocket-size digital cameras probably would have recorded the shooting from every angle.

Governments have controlled information, from the Nazis to South American dictators, hiding evidence of their "disappeared" enemies, says David Friend, an editor at Vanity Fair.

"But now the photograph has suddenly changed the equation — the power is in the hands of the average citizen," said Friend, whose 2006 book, Watching the World Change, explores the rising power of images. "Whatever you do now, you will be held accountable. You will be seen."

Friend noted that camera-equipped mobile phones were not common in the US at the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The historical record of events would have been richer if people in the twin towers or on the hijacked planes had been able to send out photos of their ordeal.

"We are now as close to an objective truth about an event as we've ever been in history," he said.

Newspapers and television networks urge readers and viewers to send their pictures of newsworthy events to supplement the work of professional photographers. And internet sites help distribute them widely — sites such as YouTube and Flickr, where anyone can post their photos and video for public consumption, are wildly popular.

NowPublic, a year-old venture, posts news and images from "citizen journalists" on its website; the site claims 31,000 reporters in 130 countries, tapping into what it calls "the wisdom of crowds".

The Reuters news agency and Yahoo joined forces to start You Witness News, which shows amateur photos and video on the Yahoo news website.