No discussion about photos of the past week would be complete without considering this insanely terrifying little video from the AP taken by Dan Yorgason as a tornado moved through an oil drilling rig camp near Watford City, ND.   This is really a far cry  from A. A. Adams’ first tornado photograph of 1884, which bears a certain nineteenth century after the fact abstraction.  A profounder reality comes from the fact that it is video and in color, not to mention that it is about as intimately close as one can get to a tornado without dying. The reddish brown is where the twister meets the ground churning up dust and debris and the white area further up into the pristine funnel cloud.  These images essentially look straight up into the vortex of the tornado.  It is a modern day Charybdis.  Odysseus had to choose consciously between Scylla and Charybdis.  It all happened so fast that Yorgason had no choice.  But having the presence of mind to grab his camera and photograph is pretty amazing.