The Moment It Clicks: Photography Secrets From One of the World's Top Shooters

to be asked, and very directly. I’m not saying to be harsh, just direct.”

    One of the privileges of my career has been to meet Kim Phuc, a.k.a. The Napalm Girl. Horribly burned at the age of nine in Vietnam, she crusades now for peace.
     
    I was sent to find people who had been the subject of Pulitzer Prize–winning photos. When you’re the subject of a Pulitzer, it is generally not by choice, because by and large, they’re not happy moments.

    So it was with Kim. She’s alive because AP shooter Nick Ut took the picture. Then he dropped his cameras and got her to a hospital. But because of the photo, her life became a bizarre, propaganda-driven odyssey. If I ever think pictures aren’t important, and I get tired, frustrated, and down, I think about Kim. Her whole life has spun on a photograph, a slice of a second.
     
    Returning from a Moscow honeymoon, she and her husband applied for asylum in Canada, so I went to meet her in Toronto. We talked. I told her I needed to see her scars. Otherwise, there was no point to my being there. She understood.

    Luckily, she was breast-feeding Thomas, her new baby, which gave us the perfect way to show how this beautiful dumpling of a baby sprang from her scarred and battered body. It is a hopeful picture, appropriate for Kim.

     

    Kim Phuc
The Pucker Factor
    You always know when you’ve got the frame. I mean the one you come for. Sometimes something we thought sucked actually works out, and sometimes the client hates what we thought was pretty good. But now I’m talking about those frames—the ones that stick. They only come along every once in a while, but when you get one, you know it.
     
    You may know it by a skip of your heart, a short gasp, a split-second of vertigo in your brain, or a feeling like you’ve just gotten a quick punch to the gut.

    Or, you may feel it elsewhere. One of the old-timers at the Daily News once looked at me and made a little circle with the tips of his fingers and his thumb, which he then started squeezing and releasing in rhythmic fashion. “You always know when you’re gettin’ good stuff, kid, ’cause you can feel your @$$hole goin’ like dis.” He continued squeezing until he was sure I got the point.

    I once related this story to a class of military photojournalists, who immediately classified this as “the pucker factor.”

    “You always know when you’ve got THE frame. You may know it by a skip of your heart, a short gasp, a split-second of vertigo in your brain, or a feeling like you’ve just gotten a quick punch to the gut.”

     

In Space, No One Can Hear You Puke
    “With the windowless plane dipsy-doodling, and people standing on the ceiling, and me looking through a lens, I realized why the plane’s nickname was the ‘vomit comet.’”

    Bring money! When it comes to getting something done in the field, pronto, there is nothing like cold, hard cash. This is very true in Russia. It’s painfully true when it comes to the Russian space program. U.S. greenbacks are the fuel in the boosters.
     
    I went to shoot a story for Life in Star City, the cosmonaut training center. We had a deal with the Russians. They reneged. Greetings, comrade! We have lied to you repeatedly!

    I got onto this plane and got this frame by stuffing $7,500 into the hands of my Russian contact at Star City on a runway in an ice storm. He jammed the wad in his pocket, turned to the pilots, and gave the signal. They spun the props and rolled down the runway.

    The zero-G plane flies parabolas—a series of steep dives followed by rapid ascents. At the top of the curve, just before the plane dives again, you go weightless for about 30 seconds. As one American astronaut told me, it’s the most fun you can have with your clothes on. Maybe so. But with the windowless plane dipsy-doodling, and people standing on the ceiling, and me looking through a lens, I realized why the plane’s nickname was the “vomit comet.”

    I retched at least 50 or more times. After a while I forgot about the bag and just horked up what was left of my stomach inside my flight suit. I was a sweaty, stinking mess. The Russian doc got so worried he started massaging my ears during the dives so I wouldn’t pass out.
     
    Astronaut Mike Lopez-Allegria held my feet to stabilize me while he was anchored to the floor with a bungee cord. I floated up and made fill flash pictures on Kodachrome. I just kept cleaning out the eyepiece to my camera and hammering