My breakout work - John Edwards at his trial - began by accident, literally. I was waiting to pay at a place here in N.C. that I had no idea he stopped in at - when I made an unknowing wisecrack to someone else often there, and was told he’d recently been in!
Over the next two years - with Edwards and his scandal in and out of the headlines here in N.C., where he and I both live, long before his indictment - I developed multiple credible sources, one a top-tier campaign donor of his who knew him well. I also read any archived news story relating to his political career I could find.
Needless to say, I stopped in that particular place often - finally once seeing him there, extremely casually dressed but still with that Hollywood-perfect hairdo. I worked it the first morning of his trial, hoping for a unique photo - but he didn’t show. It soon became obvious he was going straight from his home to the trial - and straight home from it.
However - one day partway through his trial - I was uploading photos shot on spec to a news-photo agency for that day, and had two shot less than a quarter of a second apart. One showed him looking down in the dumps - and the other showed him looking like Hollywood’s hottest superstar; the “Hollywood look” one I uploaded as an afterthought - as it seemed so surreal. The next morning, my daily Google search found the “Hollywood look” photo (below) was running on four continents - appearing in news outlets from Boston to Burma.

That photo took me to on-assignment work - including top stories such as the Petraeus/Broadwell scandal for the New York Daily News.