JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

You probably saw this photo at some point yesterday…

It’s a remarkable photo by Doug Mills, a 15-year veteran of The New York Times. (The larger it runs, the better it looks. Unfortunately, this is as big as I can run it.)

It is such a standout photo The Times wrote a story about it in today’s edition. The headline was, “A Comey Photo Storms the Internet.”

It earned tens of thousands of “upvotes” on Reddit, a social news aggregation and web-content rating website.

Doug Mills (2011 photo)

Scores of photographers were in the room for the Comey hearing and all were hoping for a memorable shot. Mills, it seems, got the one that stood out.

He mapped out his game plan well in advance, getting to the hearing room shortly after 5 a.m. — about five hours before the hearing began.

From there, in Mills’ words, is how the photo came together…

“I…set up three remote cameras: one behind the chairman; one in the ‘well,’ looking up at Mr. Comey’s chair; and one way in the back, looking out over the whole room.

“With hearings like this one, I have to preconceive the scene. I make a layout in my mind of everything that’s going to happen: the moment he arrives, the moment he sits down, the moment he raises his hand to be sworn in. And I set up my cameras to capture all those moments, to be fired remotely, all at the same time. (When I fired the picture of Mr. Comey surrounded by the press, I had the three other cameras firing too.)

“I put my fourth camera up on a full-length monopod and held it as high as I could. I pre-focused the shot ahead of time, and spent a little time making sure the image would be sharp. And, as more people arrived, I thought, ‘There’s no way I can’t put all these photographers into the foreground of the picture.’ So I took three or four steps back and zoomed out a bit.

“I wasn’t sure how well things would line up — where Mr. Comey would be, or what would be behind him. But, as it turned out, he was perfectly framed by the chairs behind him. Even before I looked at the picture, I thought, ‘Wow, this is going to be nice.’ ”

A monopod is a staff, or pole, on which a camera can be mounted. It was with the monopod that Mills got the head-on photo of Comey, with the other photographers pushing forward.

It appears from a photo that Mills took with another camera — one pointed toward the area where the senators were seated — that only one or possibly two other photographers had monopods. So he had an edge on most of the others in the equipment department.

Mills said crowd in the hearing room was as big as any he has ever seen.

“When I arrived this morning,” he said, “people were running at full speed down the hallways to try to get into the visitors’ line. They were actually running down the hallways — mostly young people who were going to stand in line for the seats open to the public. By 7 a.m. the line was as far as you can see.”

One of the most satisfying aspects of the photo is that it was on The Times’ home page in minutes, thanks to the wonders of technology.

“I use a Wi-Fi hot spot to send my pictures directly to the photo editors in New York,” Mills said, “and I can send them straight from my camera, so it happens very quickly. With this particular photo, I alerted my editor with a text message beforehand: ‘Sending you a nice picture now.’ A little while later, I saw that people were posting it on Twitter — so I knew it made it.”

…In today’s print edition, The Times ran the photo across 10 columns, straddling pages A16 and A17.

It was a thing of beauty. And you might be hearing more about it next year, when the 2017 Pulitzer Prize winners are announced.