Well, we just got the biggest hint yet. A wildlife photographer named Stephen Oachs (who is NOT sponsored by Canon and is not under NDA) is currently on safari in Kenya and spotted a Japanse man using unreleased equipment. Oachs, being a wildlife photographer on safari, had a camera and a long lens on hand, and snapped a number of photos of the man and the equipment he was using. The most important image is here:

Photo by Stephen Oachs

Stephen was even so kind as to publicly post the raw file of this photo as proof that it was not faked or manipulated in any way. After cropping and rotating the image for easier viewing, it looks like this:

Stephen Oachs' image, cropped and rotated

A few things are clear from this photo:

• -The camera this man is using is not a 5D Mark II (the control layout is all wrong, among other things)
• -It also isn’t a 7D (no pop-up flash and the button directly above and to the left of the rear scroll wheel doesn’t exist on a 7D)
• -It also isn’t any version of a 1D (the battery grip is a screw-on attachment, not integral to the camera body)

So it is clear that this is an unreleased camera. It is possible that this is a replacement not for the 5D Mark II but the 7D (a “7D Mark II”?), but seems unlikely, since the 5D Mark II should be ahead of the 7D in terms of an update and since the optical viewfinder prism looks too big for the camera to be crop-sensor.

By the way, it is also clear that this unreleased camera includes substantial video functionality, since it includes a prominent still/video switch just like the 7D.

There are now inklings coming out about a Canon announcement on Feb. 7, so it sounds like photographers’ long wait for the mythical 5D Mark III may be about to end.

The shot below is of Mount Rainier near Seattle, Washington. Every once in a while, when the light is just right and the cloud layer sits just below Mt. Rainier’s summit, early risers get the treat of seeing Rainier cast a shadow across the sky right at sunrise.

Image via http://www.komonews.com/weather/blogs/scott/132629943.html

Check out more images at http://www.komonews.com/weather/blogs/scott/132629943.html.

Now to go find my snow shovels… (seriously, shoveling in October?? I think there might be some hot chocolate in my future).

I never knew Steve Jobs; I never even met him.

And yet I, like many other people, refer to him only as “Steve.” To lots of people it probably seems weird or silly to be on a first-name basis with someone you’ve never met. But to a lot of people who admired him, he wasn’t Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, Inc., Steve Jobs, Founder of Pixar Animation or any of the other handful of titles he had. He was just “Steve.” He didn’t need any titles, because his actions, accomplishments and foibles spoke for him. If somebody talked about Steve you knew immediately that they were talking about the visionary who in addition to being a genius was also an uncompromising perfectionist and was so demanding that often he was a giant pain in the ass to the people who worked with him.

I never even met Steve, and yet my life, like many others, has been affected by him in many ways, both large and small, both superficially and fundamentally. Like millions of other people, I use his gadgets. Steve’s gadgets let me listen to music wherever and whenever I want, they keep me in touch with my friends and family, they entertain me when I’m bored sitting waiting in airports. Steve’s gadgets they tell me how to get where I’m going when I’m lost, they help me do my work creating photographs and they allow me to write this very blog post.

While these things are all important, they’re somewhat superficial. But my life has been impacted by him much more deeply as well. I started learning about Steve when I began to realize the incredible world-changing potential of the products that were coming out of Apple, mostly unnoticed at the time. I read as much about him as I could and I became convinced that there was genius there that was largely undiscovered. I invested heavily in his company when the rest of the industry was writing it off as a failure and suggesting it should be shut down, and the unbelievable returns that Apple provided me on my investment later allowed me to buy the home I now live in, which I would never have been able to afford to do as early as I did were it not for my prediction of Apple’s success.

The more I read about Steve the more fascinating he was; adopted by parents who promised his biological parents he would get a good education, he sat in on a calligraphy course in college before dropping out after one semester because it was costing his parents too much and he didn’t see the value. He lived on friends’ couches and floors returning empty bottles for food money before leaving on a spiritual trip to India, all before his twenty-first birthday when he founded Apple in his parents’ garage with his buddy Steve Wozniak. He talked about a lot of these things and many more in a Commencement address he gave to Stanford University’s graduating class in 2005. It may be the most inspirational speech I’ve heard and is certainly the best Commencement address I’ve ever heard. But the most fascinating thing about him was his absolute insistence on perfection. As the head of a multi-billion-dollar business where millions of dollars could be made or lost by even the slightest delay bringing a product to market, even then Steve was an uncompromising perfectionist. Steve was known for killing product ideas that had spent months or years in development because he didn’t think they were good enough. It is rumored that Apple engineers proposed three completely separate designs for the original iPhone, all of which Steve killed, because they weren’t up to his standards. He made the teams go back to the drawing board and do better.

It is through this uncompromising demand for excellence that Steve had what I believe will be his most important legacy. By demanding the very best and settling for nothing but, Steve inspired me through his example to challenge myself, aim higher, and demand more from myself and accomplish great things.

I am not the only person who was inspired by Steve to do great things, and as a result, each of us benefits not only from the many things Steve gave us while he was alive, but by the many things that will by accomplished by others who were motivated by his example.

The world lost a leader yesterday, someone who excited our imaginations and motivated us to aim higher than we thought we could. It seems like great human beings always die too early, but the world was lucky to have had Steve among us, for even the brief period time we did.

Rest in peace, Steve. You will be missed. The world is a better place because of you.

I was shooting with my Canon 7D camera body and a variety of lenses, primarily the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM. I chose to use my 7D body for this shoot for a variety of reasons; as the newest of my cameras its autofocus system is arguably the fastest and best, which was important for this shoot since the models and boats, the focal points of the images, were going to be in constant motion. Also, the 7D has a faster continuous-shooting frame rate than my 5D Mark II body, for example, which better allowed me to capture the fleeting moments of best facial expression, body position, etc. on the models in a fully dynamic environment like the one in which we were shooting. An additional side benefit of the 7D was that its APS-C size image sensor yields a crop factor of 1.5, meaning that all of my lenses were 50% longer, which was nice for flattening the images and bringing the subjects right up close and personal even when they were a distance out on the water.

We were slightly hampered by the fact that some clouds rolled in the middle of the shoot and therefore the light was a bit flatter and less vibrant than I would have wanted (we were relying mostly on nature to provide our light for us although we were using some modifiers and artificial light for fill), although towards the end of the day the clouds began to dissipate and gave us some nice light again towards what turned out to be the end of the day.

A slideshow of some of the images is below.

Ultimately it was a pretty good shoot and I think everybody had fun.

After we had packed up and most of the models and crew had left, I saw one more shot that I thought was worth setting a camera and tripod back up again for. I thought it was a pretty fitting end to the day.

Anyone who has set up a shoot of this sort knows that between finding and booking models, scouting appropriate locations, nailing down assistants and negotiating contracts & coordinating schedules with all of the parties, setting up this kind of shoot is a fair amount of work. But good things don’t come easy, and all of the work was worth it. Last Sunday the crew and talent assembled at the chosen location on a river just outside of Boston and had a great day of shooting.

A full collection of images from the day will be posted here tomorrow, but here is one sneak peek.

Check back tomorrow for the full collection of images and the story behind the shoot.

Kayak & Canoe First Look - ©Chris Conti Photography

The images below punch the viewer in the gut with the severity of the crisis (and some graphically depict its effect on wildlife).

This is another instance where photography won’t solve the problem (it seems that only nature can do that), but it can make people thousands of miles away who will never see the problem first hand understand just how serious the situation is, with an eye-opening immediacy that reading all the newspaper descriptions in the world never will.

Image courtesy of NASA

And here’s a closeup of the U.S. showing the storm:

Image courtesy of NASA

NASA is wonderful for this kind of stuff. I’m sure two days from now I’m going to be much less of a fan, but from 22,000 miles up, the storm is beautiful!

This is just more proof of what I’ve always thought – anything can be beautiful if you look at it in the right way.

The weather has been beautiful in Boston for the last couple of days (with the exception of that earthquake yesterday! Does that count as weather?), and I had some free time last night so I decided to go back to one of my favorite places in Boston for shooting at night.

The Longfellow Bridge connects Cambridge and Boston across the Charles river, and looks out on the part of the river known as the Sailing Basin, because as the widest, most open part of the river, the MIT, Harvard and other university sailing teams, as well as the public all use it as a great spot for sailing small boats. On any given afternoon there are dozens of sailboats on the water here.

This spot on the bridge is a favorite of mine because in addition to the great view of the river, from this vantage point there is also a great view of the Prudential building and the Hancock Tower, Boston’s two tallest skyscrapers, and the bridge faces southwest, meaning it is wonderful for shooting landscape photos at dusk.

"Charles River Basin": Canon 5D Mark II, Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM @ f/8, 17mm, 3.2 sec., ISO 160. ©Chris Conti Photography

For this image, because I knew I wanted both the natural light in the sky as well as the artificial lights inside the buildings to be visible with a nice balance between the two, it was important to wait for just the right light. I knew that would mean in this case that would mean a little bit after sunset, when the sky had dimmed sufficiently to not overpower the artificial lights (sunset photos can be gorgeous, but I’ve found that often the best light is actually after sunset, such as here). With the camera on the tripod and using a wide-angle lens (my trusty Canon 5D Mark II with the superb EF 17-40mm f/4L lens), I stopped the lens down to f/8 because shutter speed wasn’t going to be an issue (thank you, tripod) and I wanted the little bit of extra sharpness that comes with a smaller aperture. Using a remote cable release to fire the camera to avoid shake I fired a few frames to test exposure (the camera’s internal light meter here is a decent starting point but only a starting point) and play with a few different angles. Since I wasn’t using a tilt/shift lens and the camera needed to be angled up to get the framing I wanted, I had to do a bit of digital alteration in post (Photoshop’s “Lens Correction” function) to remove the distortion and make the buildings straight.

The result is what I think is a nice image, somewhat different than ones I’ve taken here before. It is by no means perfect though (if in fact an image can ever be), so I’m sure that I’ll be back to this spot again some time.

I’ve spent enough time studying, appreciating and shooting photography that I can tell pretty quickly when someone’s got The Trifecta. And pretty much instantly, I could see that Paul has it. Below are a few of Paul’s photographs. While the photographs are so powerful that they elicit an immediate visceral response, try to appreciate them for a few extra moments; consider how all three elements of The Trifecta are present in each image.

So what is The Trifecta? Here goes – the three things that contribute to truly stunning photography:

#1: Interesting Subject

It goes without saying (so much so that it’s sometimes forgotten!) that when the subject of a photograph is interesting, it is a lot more likely that the photograph itself is going to be appealing. A photograph doesn’t HAVE to have an interesting subject to be appealing (a photographer who excels in one or both of the other parts of The Trifecta can make a great photograph of even a boring, unremarkable and commonplace subject), but it sure helps. A good subject is the most obvious and, frankly, the easiest part of The Trifecta.

Photo ©Paul Nicklen, All Rights Reserved. Reprinted With Permission

It is pretty obvious why the subjects of Paul’s images are fascinating to anyone who doesn’t live above the Arctic Circle (and probably even to a lot of people who do!). He goes to the ends of the Earth (literally) to find them.

#2: Technical Skill

Many modern cameras have been designed to require a lot less technical know-how in order to use them to make a workable photograph (i.e., the “program” and “auto” modes on many cameras). But unless you get lucky, that know-how is still needed in order to make a truly great photo with the appearance the photographer envisions: does the photographer think a slight bit of motion blur is going to enhance the look of the photo? Would the photo be more striking if only a small, specific part of the subject was in focus? Does one area of a photo need more or less light than it’s getting in order to show it properly? If so, how are these things going to be accomplished? These are considerations under the best of circumstances. In a challenging environment, under challenging lighting conditions, etc., the need for technical skill goes up astronomically.

Photo ©Paul Nicklen, All Rights Reserved. Reprinted With Permission

It’s easy to take a picture of a polar bear in daylight through the fence at a zoo; when you’re in the Arctic wilderness submerged under water that’s only a few degrees above freezing and there’s nothing between you and the bear but a few feet of that water, things get a bit more complex. For example: how does the fact that the photographer is underwater affect the shutter speed needed to achieve the swimming motion visible here in the bear’s feet?

#3: Creative/Artistic Vision

Ansel Adams famously said that he didn’t simply see a pretty scene and capture it; instead he imagined in his mind an image of how he wanted a scene to look, then used all of the tools at his disposal (the technical skill) to make that image in his mind appear on paper in the photograph. This creative or artistic vision is the most important ingredient in The Trifecta, and also the hardest to come by. Creative vision is how the photographer chooses to present the image through artistic choices like composition, shape, motion, contrast, texture, color, light, darkness, depth of field and many other variables to visually convey the emotions and the visceral, gut-reaction feel desired. It is how a talented photographer can take even a bland, unremarkable everyday subject and make a striking and visually interesting image of it, or an ugly scene and find the beauty in it.

Photo ©Paul Nicklen, All Rights Reserved. Reprinted With Permission

The photo above is a perfect example of how a talented photographer can convey emotion. Looking at that image, your first reaction would be one of fright, feeling like you’re about to become dinner to a ruthless and terrifying predator. And in fact, those were the emotions Paul was feeling when he shot that image. As he describes in this video, when Paul got in the water with the seal he was intimidated by its size. But soon, he saw that the seal wasn’t threatening, but was actually trying to care for him, bringing him food and trying to feed him, the way a concerned mother would care for its young. And this friendlier, nurturing feel is evident in another photo Paul made soon after:

Photo ©Paul Nicklen, All Rights Reserved. Reprinted With Permission

It is rare indeed to see a photographer with a ready command of all three parts of The Trifecta. Too often, photographers lean on an interesting subject as a crutch to disguise weak technical skill or creative vision (this kind of failing can be seen frequently when imagery of exotic people or places is shown without artistry or any emotion conveyed with the image… this crutch is sometimes used so extensively that, in the wedding industry for example, some individuals will take on a client only if that client’s wedding takes place in a beautiful location and involves only beautiful people). Photographers must avoid the temptation to take this easy way out, and consumers should take the time to appreciate not only the subject matter of photographs, but also how they are presented, and how much of the photographer’s emotions they can feel in the image.

Because as Paul Nicklen and many other masterful photographers have shown, while one strength or another can make a good image, it takes The Trifecta to make a truly great one.

If you’re planning to take pictures of fireworks this weekend, there are a few things you can do to make your pictures much better.

#1: Camera Support. Because it’s nighttime and there’s very little light, the camera is going to need a very slow shutter speed (ie, a long exposure) to get enough light to properly expose the photo, and therefore needs to be held very still to prevent the picture from being blurry. It is very difficult to hold the camera steady enough in your hand, so you need to use something else to keep the camera from moving during the exposure. The most common kind of camera support is a tripod: if you’ve got one and are able to carry it with you, great. That’s your best option. If not though, there are other things you can do to steady the camera: anything you can rest the camera on can be used to steady it – this could be a backpack you put on the ground and then the camera on top of; a jacket you ball up, or even a fence rail, window sill or other fixed structure that the camera can sit on.

#2: The longest exposure you can manage! In the photo above, there are at least a half a dozen individual fireworks exploding. They didn’t all go off at the same time! By keeping the camera exposure as long as you can, you can pull off a trick: since the fireworks are so bright against the night sky, one going off after another after another will have the effect of “layering” the explosions on top of each other, and the single photo will end up having lots of explosions that happened at different times. The photo above was exposed for 25 seconds, so all of the explosions that happened during that whole 25 seconds show up in the photo. The flip side of this trick though, is that the camera needs to be help absolutely still for the whole time, or else the photo will be blurry, so the camera support above is that much more important.

In cameras that have full manual controls (SLR cameras and other high-end ones), setting a long exposure is easy (with an SLR camera you should also use a small aperture [high f-stop #] to gain a deeper depth of field and allow a longer exposure!). In other cameras like “point & shoot” types that can fit in your pocket, it can be trickier or impossible to set longer exposures (on some models, the “exposure compensation” can be turned all the way up to force the camera to take a longer exposure).

Fireworks, Somerville Massachusetts: Canon 5D Mark II, Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM @ f/16, 17mm, 30 sec., ISO 100. ©Chris Conti Photography

#3 Avoid the smoke. When fireworks go off they make a lot of smoke, and if the air is humid or there isn’t much wind, the smoke can hang around and obscure a clear view of the fireworks going off. If you can, try to pick a spot up-wind from where the fireworks are going to go off, so that the smoke gets blown away from you, instead of in your face. Photos look a lot better without a ton of smoke in them.

#4 Avoid extraneous light sources when you can (or at least figure out how to keep them from being distracting)! Extraneous light sources can be distracting in an image, especially since they’re going to be magnified many times in brightness by the long exposures you’re going to be using. In the image above, there were a bunch of light sources (street lights) that just couldn’t be avoided without really screwing up the framing of the image. I did work though to keep a really, really bright light that was facing straight at me out of the frame to the left. Even so though, you can see the light and lens flare that came from that light.

Good luck, and have fun!

The crowd for the Somerville fireworks display: iPhone photo ©Chris Conti Photography

No sooner than I had set up my tripod I was approached by a woman who introduced herself as writer for the Boston Globe, asking me who I was there shooting for (in other words, if I worked for another news organization). When I replied that I’m a self-employed photographer and was just there shooting photos for my own amusement, she asked if she could use one of my photos for her Globe article – apparently the Globe “didn’t have budget” to send one of their own photographers to cover the event.

Everyone knows that times are very tough for print media organizations – since everyone is getting their news online, newspapers’ subscriber bases are evaporating and with them go the newspapers’ revenue, which has resulted in terrible staff cuts at just about every paper. But it is a sad state of affairs indeed when a leading regional newspaper “doesn’t have budget” to pay a photojournalist to cover an event on which they plan to publish a story, and this was an example of why I am very, very glad that I am not a photojournalist.

In any case, I was there shooting photos anyway, and since they’d already decided they weren’t going to pay for photography of the event (that much was clear) I told the writer that provided I was given proper credit for the photo, I’d give the Globe one to run with their story*. The writer took my email address, and several hours later via email I sent her a few photos I captured from the evening.

For the Globe’s article, they picked one of the photos I sent, and the writer actually quoted me as well (which I didn’t know she was going to do! If I’d known I was going to be quoted, I’d have paid attention to my grammar!). The article can be seen here: http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/somerville/2011/07/somerville_fireworks_light_up.html

Here are a few of the photos I shot that night (it really was a great display, and as Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone was sure to point out, the fireworks didn’t cost taxpayers a dime, since they were funded in full through private donations).

Fireworks, Somerville Massachusetts: Canon 5D Mark II, Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM @ f/16, 17mm, 30 sec., ISO 100. ©Chris Conti Photography

Fireworks, Somerville Massachusetts: Canon 5D Mark II, Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM @ f/16, 17mm, 30 sec., ISO 100. ©Chris Conti Photography

Fireworks, Somerville Massachusetts: Canon 5D Mark II, Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM @ f/16, 17mm, 30 sec., ISO 100. ©Chris Conti Photography

*: I understand this issue may anger some professionals in the industry who rely on paying editorial work. The debate about shooting for pay vs. shooting solely for a credit is not an insignificant one, and it is truly embarrassing for the Globe  that they have cut back so dramatically on paying editorial work that they didn’t send a staff photographer or editorial freelancer to shoot something that they thought was important enough to warrant a story. It is a bad time to be an editorial photographer or photojournalist indeed.

It was a reminder of why I do what I do. I love my job.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(for best viewing, click the “HD” button to “on” and watch it full-screen by clicking the four-arrows button)

That, and worse, is exactly what can happen now when you upload your pictures to a lot of popular web services.

You know those unbelievably long “Terms & Conditions” that pop up whenever you sign up for a website or web service? The ones that are so full of legalese as to be incomprehensible? The ones that you never read, but instead just scroll to the bottom and click “I Accept”? You always know that’s a bad idea, and that you really should read them… and you always know, in the back of your head somewhere, that somewhere buried somewhere in those agreements is something you don’t want.

Well, in the case of TwitPic, the ubiquitous service for Twitter users to post pictures, that “something you don’t want” is giving TwitPic the right to sell your pictures and videos… to whoever they want, to be used wherever and however they want. And they won’t even tell you first (Facebook also has similar language that lets them use your pictures in ads, etc without telling you).

TwitPic changed its “Terms of Service” yesterday to add the following:

That means anything you upload to TwitPic they can turn around and sell (without giving you any of the money, by the way). Who would they be selling it to? Well, it turns out that yesterday’s change to the “Terms of Service” isn’t a coincidence: TwitPic just signed a deal with the celebrity gossip content agency WEBB (yep, the people who sell pictures to the National Enquirer and other gossip rags) to have access to all of TwitPic’s (ie, your) pictures & video.

In reality, it is unlikely that TwitPic would sell your pictures of your less-than-sober friends to anyone… because, let’s be honest, while they’re interesting to you, those pictures aren’t really financially valuable to the rest of the world. But, if you happen to be at the right place at the right time and take a picture of something or someone newsworthy, or take a particularly striking or unique photo? You can bet TwitPic is going to turn around and sell it without even telling you, and your picture will end up on a website somewhere (probably a website of questionable integrity, since those are the places that buy content from places like WEBB) and you won’t even know it. TwitPic will make a bunch of money, and you won’t get a dime.

As I mentioned, these types of arrangements are becoming increasingly common with web sites and services recently – Facebook, Instagram, YFrog and most other Twitter photo services all have similar language in their Terms of Service. Basically, you have to assume that any web service you use has this type of legal language. For professional photographers, these agreements are particularly problematic: If, for example, I’m working for an outdoor equipment company and make a landscape photograph of a hiker on a trail and I were to upload that photo to Facebook, TwitPic, etc., I can’t legally give my client exclusive use of that photograph, because by using their services, I’ve already given Facebook or TwitPic the right to use it… and therefore, my entire agreement with my client is void. As a result, professional photographers know not to use any of these services with any of their work that they care about (which is why you’ll see very few photos on my Facebook or Twitter profiles!).

The moral of the story is, be really careful what you do with your photos. You may have agreed to something you don’t necessarily want.

Among the countless pieces of media coverage today have been many photographs from all over the world, and for me (unsurprisingly) these have been the most powerful. From crowds of young Americans cheering in front of the White House to a somber and angry procession of radical militants in Yemen mourning Bin Laden’s death, the photographs that we’ve seen today will serve as the world’s memory of this day for generations to come. They are a reminder of the power of a photograph, and are an affirmation of why we as photographers do what we do.

One photo in particular that I think went largely unnoticed in the flood of coverage today crystallizes in a nutshell the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words.” The photo, below, by official White House photographer Pete Souza, shows President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other senior members of the U.S. leadership in the White House Situation Room watching updates on the raid on Bin Laden’s hideout live as it was taking place.

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza, via www.whitehouse.gov

It’s rare that the public gets to see a raw, unposed look at our leaders, especially in as tense a moment as this, and the expressions on the faces of the individuals in the room couldn’t be more telling. From what we know, it seems likely that this assembled group was watching live video feed via satellite from the Navy SEALs as they were storming Bin Laden’s compound, and this photo would seem to support that – Look at the stone-faced concern on the president’s face; look at the expression of what can only be described as sheer horror on that of Secretary Clinton: photographs like this give us a rare glimpse into what our leaders face and feel behind closed doors. They let us imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes.

This is the power of photography: to tell stories and convey emotions – whether they are jubilation, love, anxiety or fear – that we could not convey any other way.

(Note: The White House has noted that a classified document in this photo was digitally altered to obscure its contents. A quick examination shows that the piece of paper on top of Secretary Clinton’s laptop has been obscured. It would appear that that document is an aerial photograph of the compound where Bin Laden was found.)

UPDATE: It seems that in the last two days this photo has become extremely famous. The White House uploaded this photo to its Flickr stream and it has apparently become Flickr’s “fastest viewed” photo ever, reaching over two million views in only two days. Flickr now predicts that it will become its most-viewed photo ever sometime tomorrow or the next day after passing three million views… in only 3-4 days.

Additionally, commentators other than myself have started started discussing the photo, and it has been suggested that this photo may well become one of the iconic, lasting images of Barack Obama’s presidency. The New York Times’ David Brooks and Gail Collins discuss this photo here. In their discussion, Brooks identifies many of the same issues I noted. Additionally though, Brooks very keenly notes that in the photo, President Obama is sitting not at the head of the table, but off to the side:

“The posture of the president is fascinating. Instead of occupying the power chair in the center of the table, he is perched on a low chair off the side, hunched over looking tense. If you just looked at this picture, you might think that Joe Biden was president or Bill Daley, who is standing behind looking imposing and grave. You’d think Obama was a midlevel aide. I think what happened is this: some sort of communication or technical relay had to be done, so the president got out of his chair and relinquished it to Brig. Gen. Brad Webb, who is the assistant commanding general of the Joint Special Operations Command. The president just slid over to the low chair off to the side, which one of the standers must have relinquished. Still, I wonder how many White Houses would have been confident enough to release a photo with the president looking so diminutive. I think it speaks well of Obama and the administration that they released this as the iconic image of the decision-making process behind the event.”

I agree. I think it shows confidence on the part of the president that he is willing to be depicted publicly in the manner shown in this photo.

In any case, I agree that this photo, which was initially nearly lost in the flood of media coverage around the event, could well become the central image of how history remembers Barack Obama’s presidency.