The little girl was fascinated by my hair.

She stood behind me stroking the back of my head as I sat on the ground, pursuing the photographer’s old friend — the low-angle shot. A few feet away lay the collapsed rubble of her orphanage outside Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Within moments, other children noticed the new target, and I was surrounded — covered, nearly — in sweet orphan children. I count 10 of them in a photograph of me from that day.

Ask any hungry person whether they prefer food or affirmation, and they would all choose the first. Yet all that these children wanted from me were hugs and attention.

Still, I needed to take pictures.

An old photographer’s joke goes this way. First photographer: “I saw a homeless man on the street today who was desperately hungry.” Second photographer: “What did you give him?” First photographer: “1/250th at F8.”

The fact that nobody gets that joke speaks of both the sophistication of modern cameras and the odd tensions of my first chosen profession. Of all the disciplines of storytelling, nothing else does the job in quite the same way as a great photograph. But it comes at a price. You get to shoot it, or you get to live it. You can’t really have both.

The first half of my career was spent in newspapers, where the distinction was clear and obvious. You don’t get involved with the subject. You don’t cheer from the sidelines no matter how great the touchdown catch, and you don’t cry at a funeral no matter how sad the tale. To the layman, that may make us look like heartless ghouls, but it’s really a kind of defense mechanism. Behind cameras, I’ve witnessed some truly horrific scenes, memories that can be haunting decades later. But in the moment, there’s a job to do — professionally and compassionately, of course — but it still must be done. You observe it as if in a museum, separated by glass.

These days I often have the great privilege of working with groups driven by a loving agenda. But in a sense, that makes the problem more difficult, as I’ve personally seen in Haiti, Africa, the Philippines and Central America. How easy it would be to simply forget the cameras and hug the children. Explaining the lack of photos to the client is another matter entirely.

A few years ago, I travelled with a microfinance organization to a meeting of their loan clients on a mountaintop pasture above Mbarara, in southwestern Uganda. When the occasion called for a low angle, I sat down on the ground. Within moments, I was again surrounded by a dozen children. They called me by a name I can’t recall, which I later found out meant “white people.” We were the first people of European descent the children had ever seen. Soon, I just put my cameras down, started laughing and extended my arms. They were fascinated by the hair on them.

Not much of a photograph. But it made a great memory.