Focus : The Whole Picture : THE STORIES BEHIND NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC’S PHOTOGRAPHS

Picture this: a dolphin leaping madly out of the Irish Sea, curving its body in symmetry with the landscape, leaping and spinning while the object of its affections, an innkeeper’s dog, looks on from the rail of a moving boat.

Or this: night in Sudan, the smell of sweat and cattle and an old man telling the story of how life began.

These are the miracle moments--the ones photographers trek halfway across the world to see and attempt to relay on film.

“The Photographers,” airing Sunday as part of the National Geographic “Explorer” series, captures a few of these moments, as described and experienced by photojournalists working for National Geographic magazine.

“The greatest moment I ever had as a photographer was in Ireland,” watching the dolphin and the dog, says Sam Abell, who is one of a half-dozen shooters featured in the program.

Abell, who lives at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in central Virginia, has been enamored of photography since he was a child working in a converted fruit cellar that served as his father’s darkroom. He has been making pictures for National Geographic since participating in a college internship at the magazine in 1967.

“These photographers are on the road eight or nine months out of the year,” says Jaime Bernanke, writer and producer on the program. Some, like Abell, are married, but many have had relationships sacrificed to the camera and the road.

The point of “The Photographers,” Bernanke says, is to tell the stories behind the pictures.

“For all these gorgeous photographs of fantastic creatures and faraway places, there are real people, taking those photographs and living these amazing lives,” Bernanke says. (Keep in mind, though, one of the most famous National Geographic photographers at the moment, Richard Kincaid in “The Bridges of Madison County,” existed only in the mind of the author.)

The TBS program cuts back and forth from interviews with the photographers to videotapes of them in the field. Photographer Michael (Nick) Nichols, for example, is shown dodging flies and mosquitoes in Africa, and colleague Jodi Cobb careens up and down the aisle as the famous train Orient Express chugs across Asia.

Much of the footage of photographers on location used in the program is not new, Bernanke says. A number of the documentary sequences were shot for previous profiles. The interviews, however, were recorded just for this show, as was footage of Cobb’s trip on the Orient Express.

In voice-overs, the photographers explain how and why they took particular shots.

Key to the final image, say several of them, is taking the time to build a relationship with the subjects--getting to know people, places and even animals well enough to capture their spirits on film. National Geographic photographers generally spend several months on each assignment. Newspaper and most magazine photographers, by contrast, visit locations for a few days at most.

“I look at photography now as a relationship between the photographer and the subject,” says co-producer Robin Goldman. Viewers “will see how photographers think and what leads up to an image.”

Despite National Geographic’s reputation as mostly a chronicler of culture and geography, photographer Robert Caputo views much of his work as journalistic--even political. Caputo has specialized in stories about Africa, visiting Somalia at the height of the famine and telling the story of AIDS in Uganda through pictures.

His most compelling experience came when covering Sudan, he says. When the roads wouldn’t go any farther, he hiked the back-country, looking for a cattle camp.

He recounts “spending days with [the people], sleeping under the stars at night and listening to an old man tell a story about where man came from.”

Viewers with an interest in photography will not learn what cameras or lenses to use, or how to set up the light for a special shot by watching the program.

But the photographers do discuss what makes a good picture.

A particularly difficult challenge, says Abell, is going to a place like Ireland, which has been photographed, painted and written about countless times, and coming back with something new.

The dolphin picture came about after a nasty few days in Dublin--he was mugged as soon as he arrived--prompted the photographer and his wife to retreat to the Dingle Peninsula on the west coast.

“It rained continually for four or five days and deepened my blues,” Abell recalls. “The innkeeper said, ‘You’re not looking too good--why don’t you come sailing with me. I’ll be taking my dog, and my dog has a relationship with a dolphin.’ ”

Not believing him for a minute, Abell went along anyway. He got the picture.

“The Photographers” airs Sunday at 6 p.m. and Monday at 9:30 p.m. on TBS.