Doug Mills joined The New York Times in 2002. 15 years is ample time to prepare for the best photos to come out of Thursday’s hearing in Capitol Hill testimony delivered by James Comey – a hearing Mr Mills describes as “one of the most crowded — if not the most crowded” he’d ever been to. And Mr Mills was at the 1987 Joint Iran-Contra hearings.

“There was so much hype about this hearing: It was being called the Super Bowl of hearings on Capitol Hill. That clearly amped up everybody, including the photographers.”

He already knew (from being a diligent person and catching up on all available information including Comey’s opening statements) that it was going to be a hustle to get a good shot at the hearings despite the fact that photographers’ “spots were marked”.

So Mr Mills “got to the hearing room early — shortly after 5 a.m. — and 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.”

On his way to “216 Hart”, the room where the “super bowl” was set to hold within Hart Senate Office Building, he saw “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.”

We saw it too:

He had read Mr Comey’s opening statements and figured there’d be no need to take close shot photos of him since there was very little possibility of the hearings getting “contentious or heated” enough to produce any “intriguing “facial expressions”.

Actually, the hearing did produce one such moment when Mr Comey seemed to be sniffling as he apologised to America and the FBI for the Trump administrations’ lies about disarray in the bureau. But what do we know?

Having “preconceived the scene”, Doug Mills set up three cameras around the room – “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” – and then he held one on a monopod in front of Mr Comey. He wanted to get photos of Mr Comey “the moment he arrives, the moment he sits down, the moment he raises his hand to be sworn in”. And all from at least three different angles.

So when he got that great photo, he also had this:

That’s Doug Mills at the centre left holding his fourth camera up on a monopod as he shot the first image. One of the three other cameras remotely triggered this image at the same time.

Even before I looked at the picture, I thought, “Wow, this is going to be nice.”

It says a lot that among so many photographers, only Doug Mills (and one other) thought to take the photograph the same moment from a different angle. Says quite a lot.

Mr Mill’s Wi-Fi enabled camera was used to send the photo immediately to New York Times photo editors in New York and within minutes the world was blessed with that genius. It was not only on The New York Times homepage but also trending on Twitter.

See other photos Doug Mills took that day:

And then a video: