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To Get the Shot, Nerve, Luck and Scuba Gear

Al Bello, a Brooklyn native and award-winning photographer for Getty Images, with his underwater camera.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

LONDON — As Al Bello struggles to wedge his lean body into his scuba gear, it appears that taking the photographs has to be the easy part.

Bello pulls the skintight black shirt over his shoulders, tugs the legs of his shorts closer to his knees and straps on a heavy tank. Placing a mask on his shaved head and flippers on his feet, he drops backward off the edge into the Olympic pool, where he will spend more time during these Games than Michael Phelps or Ryan Lochte.

A camera rests three meters down, its lens protected by a clear glass dome the size of mixing bowl. Bello, a 44-year-old Brooklyn native and an award-winning photographer for Getty Images, placed it there a week ago.

He and his colleagues Clive Rose and Adam Pretty visit the camera daily — sometimes more than once — to change its battery, shift its position and adjust its connections to the metal plate that holds it in place on the pool floor.

Sports photographers who shoot underwater used to free-dive to make these adjustments; now many, including Bello, Rose and Pretty, are certified scuba divers. That has given them the comfort of extended time underwater to perfect the art of capturing the world’s best swimmers from below. But it also leads to an odd sight every night at the London Aquatics Centre: a glass-and-plastic reef composed of 10 cameras and a platoon of frogmen who enter the pool soon after the last race to tend to them.

“You’ve kind of got to visualize what you want,” said Bello, who has been scuba-certified for a decade. “You have to look under there and see the ceiling or a clean pool with no swimmer in it and just think to yourself: this is what’s going to happen, this is where the swimmer’s going to break the water, this is where a reflection might be, this might be a good angle where a swimmer might come into your frame.”

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Al Bello positioned the camera to capture Michael Phelps in the 200-meter butterfly heat on Sunday.Credit...Al Bello/Getty Images

Swimming’s million-dollar shot can be had for about $30,000 in equipment, but it takes a lot of nerve and a little luck to create something memorable.

When Heinz Kluetmeier of Sports Illustrated snapped a series of pictures of Michael Phelps catching Serbia’s Milorad Cavic in the final meters of the 100-meter butterfly in Beijing in 2008, the photos became a story in themselves. The tension of the frame-by-frame advance of Cavic leading Phelps, of Phelps taking one last stroke as Cavic glides in, of their hands reaching desperately for the wall, remains as dramatic as the live finish was.

The image of four sets of fingertips bent backward against the touch pads prompted a Serbian protest, instantly becoming an aquatic Zapruder film. Kluetmeier, 69, donated it to the International Swimming Hall of Fame, which sells copies.

“Journalistically speaking, it was the best swimming photo ever taken at the Olympics,” Kluetmeier said.

He should know. He was the first person to place a camera at the bottom of an Olympic pool, at the Barcelona Games in 1992. That year he dived the 12 feet to the bottom, only to resurface to find a guard with a submachine gun.

“He said I had to take it out,” Kluetmeier said. “He thought it was a bomb.”

One of the images that camera captured, of Mel Stewart winning the 200-meter butterfly in record time with the scoreboard above him, remains a Kluetmeier favorite. “After that, 100 people wanted to do it,” he said.

Not everyone can. There is a waiting list to join wire services like Getty and Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency, as well as magazines like Sports Illustrated, at the bottom of the pool.

Preparation is everything. Each camera has to be set up to focus on a specific race, or perhaps two lanes where a close finish is expected. Sometimes a camera will wait all day for a specific swimmer to splash into frame.

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Ruolin Chen and Hao Wang of China sliced the water in the women’s synchronized 10-meter platform diving final on Tuesday. The pair won gold.Credit...Jed Jacobsohn for The New York Times

They use a handheld trigger to operate the shutter. It’s connected, via cable, to the camera at the bottom of the pool. Now that cameras are all digital, almost as soon as they are taken, the images can be viewed on a laptop.

On Sunday night, Bello prepared for his day’s turn with the shutter’s trigger by spending a half-hour in the pool setting up a shot of Phelps. Bello knew Phelps would swim his morning preliminary in Lane 4, so he pulled the camera to the surface, swapped an 8-millimeter fisheye lens into its housing, replaced the dome and returned it to the bottom. Then he floated above it, so Rose could check the focus on a poolside laptop, and crossed his fingers.

A number of things can go wrong underwater, the photographers say: camera housings can leak, cables can get wet or short out, or batteries can die. If any problem occurs, an entire day’s session can be lost. And there is always the chance a competitor will collide with the camera, or kick it out of position.

The 12-time Olympic medalist Natalie Coughlin said that at the 2002 Pan Pacific championships, her deep backstroke starts sometimes caused her to hit a camera at the bottom of the pool, but her coach had it moved before she raced. “Now,” she said, “it’s not distracting at all.”

Pretty said curiosity was a bigger concern. A swimmer at the Commonwealth Games once grabbed the dome on his camera and tried to look through it. “But I was lucky because they moved it diagonally and it looked quite cool,” he said. “So I was like, ‘Huh, I’ll take credit for that.’ ”

Bello, Rose and Pretty share scuba duties and control of the underwater camera’s trigger, taking turns a day at a time. Each has his own vision of what he wants to emerge when the splashing stops. Pretty advocates setting up for the one shot he most wants. Rose said it was important to try something different every day, “otherwise you just get the same picture over and over.”

Bello, who is covering his ninth Olympics, said he was still searching. Now that more cameras are in the pool, he said, it is harder to produce something special.

“I am looking for a picture that’s in my head that I want to come out through my hands underwater through the camera,” he said, adding, “I’ve wanted that Phelps shot for a year and now I’ve got it.”

2012 LONDON

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: How Maestros Make Their Moment. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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