"Can you imagine how fast people fall?"

“I was standing next to a New York City police officer and a woman who was an EMT. We were looking up at the building and I was photographing it, and the police officer said, ‘I was here when the second plane hit. It was a big f—king airplane, like a 737 or something.’ That was the first time I heard of a second plane, and then he said he heard the Pentagon may have also gotten hit. I was like, ‘Whoa.’ The EMT then pointed up and said, ‘Oh my god, look!’ And that’s when we noticed people coming down from the building. We don’t know whether they were overcome by smoke. I was photographing several people coming down from the building and I have a sequence of photographs of this guy coming down. The camera captured the photograph in a sequence, since it had a motor drive on it, so the camera captured a moment. If the camera functioned a fraction of a second earlier, I wouldn’t have had that picture. It was the camera that captured the photograph, not my eye and quick finger. Can you imagine how fast people fall? They’re falling really fast, and while you’re photographing this you have to pan with them so I picked this guy up in my viewfinder, put my finger on the button, and kept taking pictures while he was falling. I had to time my vertical motion of the camera to his descent.

Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/08/richard-drew-s-the-falling-man-ap-photographer-on-his-iconic-9-11-photo.html#ixzz1XU2b6JA1