I heard that they've got a crew of people looking at the photos that Cho Seung-Hui sent NBC. Here's my own analysis, coming from being a professional photog myself. Sorry that these images are going to be so big that they break my template tables, but I wanted to get detail in.


This photo suggests that Cho is using a point and shoot camera. Let's look at the shadows on the bullets from his flash.

Change in direction. Note how the shadows go from left to right depending on what side of the photo they are on. This tells us that the main light source is between these two objects.

No-shadow bullets. There are bullets slightly right of center that have almost no shadow. This means they are receiving direct light.

Downward-facing shadows. This means the light source is above them.

Rate of change. The shadows change in length very quickly. This means they are very close to the light source.

So it can be concluded that this is shot with on-camera flash that is very close to the lens and slightly to its left (when facing the camera). This suggests a point and shoot camera. Higher-end cameras often have the flash above the lens.

The point marked with an asterisk shows a very small shadow, which shows that there is a second light source in the room: likely the room's artificial lighting.



The reflective, full out white in the gun barrel further supports the direct flash theory.

The dark areas of in the corners (marked with a +) have a lot of noise in them. The look of the photos in these areas reminds me of disposable camera photos processed and saved to a CD. Or these could have been digitally taken photos edited by NBC and brought up to fix an originally dark photo. If i had the original files, I could tell a lot more.

What's certain is that these photos were not originally exposed properly. It seems if Cho had a digital camera, that he would review his images and retake dark photos. Yet, the sheer number of these photos would mean that he either took many rolls of film and narrowed it down or did actually take these with a digital camera. It's really hard to take a picture where you're in the frame without being able to preview the image.

To me I would have to guess he used a tripod. More on that below.


This photo is crooked, and therefore we can assume that someone else did not take the photo, or they would have gotten the image straighter.

This photo is taken with a wide angle lens. As you can see, the line of the cinder-block wall is distorted beyond a straight line (see area by asterisk), something wide angle lenses do.

The shadow marked with a + is characteristic of point and shoot cameras.


[photos edited to bring out wall detail]

Here we see two photos placed over one another. The angle of the tilt is the same. Therefore, these photos were likely taken with the camera in the same position. Cho set up his camera on the self timer, took a photo, changed gear, and then took another photo.

Closing: All these photos are taken from the NBC News website and the sites that covered them. I took screen captures working from their files. If I had the original files, I could tell a lot more about the photos, including, most likely, the time the photos were taken at and what model camera they were taken with. That assumes they were on a digital camera. If they were taken with a film camera, well, someone had to develop them.

Edit [random addition]:
If his camera was a digital camera and relatively new, it's likely that they videos were shot on it as well, especially being in quicktime format.

The change in brick scale on the above animation is from having to overlay screenshots from two different sources. Again, working with originals would fix that problem.