The Decisive Moment

Writing about Biden yesterday left a black cloud over my soul.  I must purge it with something less depressing.  So, I did some looking around for things that would cheer me up.  And I found this guy Alex at a YouTube channel called the “The Photographic Eye.”  He’s a Brit and says he’s been a professional photographer for about 30 years.  Which is fine and all that but what I found was a video he had called “Train Your Mind To See Photos Everywhere”.

So, the video is a talk on how to approach everyday items and circumstances to look for the interesting photographs hidden there.  And the images he provides as examples are mostly very mundane things; inside a city bus, a table with a partially unfinished jigsaw puzzle, details inside a restaurant or a construction site.

And the images are indeed mundane and some of them had no appeal for me as photographic subjects and yet others made me stop and look and think, “Yes, that would be an interesting shot.”

As a second exercise he discussed the classic idea of “the decisive moment.”  Even a lazy individual such as myself has read enough about photography to have heard about the French street photography pioneer Henri Cartier-Bresson and his idea of identifying an optimal or even a unique moment when a photograph reveals some dramatic aspect frozen in time. But here Alex advises us to take this same idea and translate it into a mundane environment.  Maybe a train station or a street corner.  But by studying the dynamic nature of the people in that environment you may find the moment when this situation provides an optimal chance for an interesting image.  Here he says that the skill is to tune into the rhythm of the location and stop ignoring the details that we usually tune out when on a street or in a supermarket.

And his third exercise he recommended that a photographer keep a book or even capture some ideas with his phone, where he writes down ideas for future photographs.  Maybe it is a place you saw as you were driving or maybe it’s a thing you saw on tv or in a book.  His point was that ideas often occur when you haven’t got a camera or you haven’t got the time but if you can build up a list of ideas you can plan an expedition or even an indoor shoot around your neighborhood or even in your house.  But as long as you jot it down you have the chance of following up on this good idea, instead of forgetting it again.

And so, these exercises are away to develop your sense of what makes an interesting picture and at the same time to make photography an everyday activity and make it an active rather than passive activity and finally to make it fun.

And in that final aspect, his advice worked.  I grabbed my camera with my macro lens and started stalking around my living room looking for juxtapositions with nick-nacks, books and random household articles.  And before I knew it, I was having a lot of fun.  Now I haven’t reviewed any of these shots in my post processing software so I have no idea whether I’ll still think they were worthwhile once I have a chance to look at them critically.  But I can say that my excitement about taking some shots was higher than it’s been since the leaves fell off the trees this fall.

So, to hell with Joe Biden and all of his rot.  If we let him destroy this country then we probably deserve it.  But I sure as hell won’t spend every waking hour thinking about it.  Life’s too short.  I’d rather spend it looking for the decisive moment.  Or maybe just getting a really nice butterfly shot.