What Makes a Great Picture: Jim Bourg Edition

I tried, I really tried resisting posting this picture. But I can't help it; it won't get out of my head. I first saw it last week, the day after the debate, and I could not. believe. my eyes. I mean, I watched this debate. And although McCain had some sputtering and some eye-rolling, I never saw him impersonate the iguana. But he did-- Reuters photographer Jim Bourg caught him.

Thanks to the modern miracle of blog science, Bourg actually wrote about the birth of this wonder on the Reuters blog. Check it out. Here's a snippet:

"In any case, when I saw McCain lunge and his hands start to come up I hit the shutter and made two frames before it was over. Some other photographers who were there expressed surprise when they saw my picture and said they had never seen it happen at all and asked when it had occurred. When I saw the television tape of it later on the news I too was surprised at how momentary and fast the move by Senator McCain was. Strangely enough Senator McCain again stuck his tongue out in a similar way 3-4 minutes later while standing between his wife Cindy and Senator Obama at the front of the stage, a moment captured by my colleague Shannon Stapleton and other wire service photographers in attendance and once again shown on national and international television.

The picture, as with all my pictures that night, was remotely edited by an editor off site, viewing my pictures as I shot them over the internet and working with other editors who processed and captioned the pictures along with photos from the other three Reuters photographers shooting the debate. This photo was just one of 40 of my pictures that were transmitted on the Reuters wire from this debate and one of more than 100 from our crew of photographers, which included Gary Hershorn, Shannon Stapleton, Jim Young and Carlos Barria.

By the time I got back to my hotel room that night people were already discussing the photo on the internet and by the next morning my email inbox was filling with messages about the picture. Some people complimented me on the photo while others strongly criticized both myself and Reuters for shooting and transmitting a news photo of a very public moment that had taken place in front of more than 60 million television viewers at the culmination of a major and historic public event."

Photography: it can ferret out the essence of the modern politician more accurately than the human eye. Amazing.