"Every time I cover a disaster like this, a little piece of me is lost," writes veteran photographer Jewel Samad after covering the aftermath of an earthquake and a tsunami in Indonesia that killed more than 2,000 people and left thousands more missing.

"The soft part of you, the part that feels, that cares, the human part I guess. It kills that part of you a bit. I can feel that it’s not as strong as it was before, when I first started being a photojournalist."

"The bar was cheap, dingy and smelly, but we were thrilled beyond words to find it," writes New Delhi-based journalist Bhuvan Bagga.

"After a day of reporting on one of the worst flood-hit regions in India’s Kerala state, we desperately needed a place with an electricity plug to recharge our equipment, a place to sit and a half-decent Internet connection so that we could send the reporting that we had gathered to our desks and on to the outside world."