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Picture of the Year: Obama taking oath of office

Each year, the editors at MSNBC.com select the cream of the year’s news photos and then ask readers to vote for the image they find most memorable.The votes for 2009 are now in. In third place, with 5,051 votes, was the photo of the miracle landing on the Hudson made by Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and the crew of US Airways Flight 1549 on Jan. 15.In second place, with 5,380 votes, w
/ Source: TODAY

Each year, the editors at MSNBC.com select the cream of the year’s news photos and then ask readers to vote for the image they find most memorable.

The votes for 2009 are now in. In third place, with 5,051 votes, was the photo of the miracle landing on the Hudson made by Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and the crew of US Airways Flight 1549 on Jan. 15.

In second place, with 5,380 votes, was “From bedtime to the front lines” — an image of soldiers from the U.S. Army 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry under fire from Taliban militants in Afghanistan on May 11, including Spc. Zachery Boyd, who rushed out of bed and into combat so quickly that he was still wearing “I love NY” boxer shorts as he returned fire.

Those images were indeed memorable, but with 7,045 votes, the winner you chose for 2009: Year in Pictures is photographer Chuck Kennedy’s now iconic image of President Barack Obama taking the oath of office on Jan. 20, Inauguration Day, with his family by his side.

The picture was taken with a remote-controlled camera placed on the podium, the closest any camera has ever been to an inaugural oath.

Photographer Chuck Kennedy was working for McClatchy-Tribune Photo Service when he captured the memorable image. Kennedy continues to photograph President Obama today, but he now wears the hat of a White House photographer.

Kennedy shared his thoughts on capturing a “great moment”:

This is a special picture for several reasons, but a lot of people probably don’t realize that one of the reasons it is unique is because this is an angle we’ve never seen on a swearing-in. What makes it so unusual?



I’ve covered four or five inaugurations, and most of the time the positions kind of hold you at a distance and you have to shoot it with a long lens, and you don’t really get any kind of good perspective that shows the Capitol above the person getting sworn in. So for this inauguration I tried really hard to get permission to get a remote camera at the base of the podium, so that you could see up, you could see the whole family, you could see the girls, the Capitol dome, and what turned out to be a cold but blue-sky day.

Is this the first time this has been done?



This was the first time that the Senate allowed a remote camera to be placed in this position. Basically, the camera was almost at the feet of where the president would be giving his inaugural address from, sort of pointing back to the area where the chief justice would end up swearing in the president.

How did you manage to get the camera placed there? And why was it so important?