On 09 September, one picture made the front pages of many news websites after a South Carolina Republican shouted "You Lie!" at President Barack Obama in the House of Representatives. The picture, shown below, was shot by Getty Images' photographer Chip Somodevilla. BJP asked him how he got that photo.

'The exclamation "You lie!" rang out inside the House Chamber at just the moment when President Barack Obama had finished saying that health care reform would not benefit illegal immigrants,' Somodevilla tells BJP. 'The rant continued and it was loud enough in the semi-quiet chamber that I could tell what general direction it was coming from and Rep. Joe Wilson made it easy for me to spot him in a seated crowd. He dropped his cupped hands from around his mouth and began to wag his finger and shout at the president. "That’s not true!" he continued. Without a thought, I lifted my camera, framed him up, auto-focused and fired a burst of shots all at the same time. The images I made before and after the one that has been most published are out of focus. It was pure luck.'

He continues: 'When I made the photo I was standing in what is called the Writers Gallery, a tiered row of desks and stools that runs the width of the chamber above and behind where the president stands when addressing Congress. So naturally, my primary responsibility that night was not the president but to look for the reaction to the speech by important members of Congress.'

As with most news photos, Somodevilla didn’t realize the importance of what he had at first. 'The reaction in the chamber was palpable. A collective gasp followed by very aggressive murmuring. I chimped the photo on the back of the camera, saw I had one in focus and quickly quizzed other photographers and reporters about who it was that had shouted and what exactly he had said. Congressional Quarterly staff photographer Scott Farrell asked some of the CQ reporters and gave me Rep. Wilson’s name and I wrote it on a sheet of paper and photographed it. This conveyed the information to Chief Photographer Win McNamee who was in the next room where he was live editing my images (I was tethered into his laptop via Ethernet cable). That was it. It was on the wire before the president finished his speech.'

But how was Somodevilla able to quickly find Wilson in a room filled with more than 550 politicians. 'He just happened to be sitting in my field of view at that moment,' he says. 'Had he decided to lose his composure five minutes before or after the time when he did then I would have missed it. Experience played a hand as well. In the last four years I’ve photographed three State of the Union speeches and four other joint sessions of Congress, including addresses by prime ministers Gordon Brown and Nouri Al-Maliki. The House chamber is a very big room but the more time you spend there the smaller it seems.'