The Decisive Moment II

The Decisive Moment, Part II

In I wrote what the decisive moment is and how, with lots of practice, one can hone his skills at it and bring the quality of his photographs to a higher level. In some cases, such as the example I gave, it took lots of shooting to find the moment that made for a good picture.

Sometimes you get lucky and the decisive moment finds you with the first and only picture you shoot of a subject.

When I was in college as a photojournalism major, I was also an art education minor. The State of New York required all teachers-in-the-making to clock in 300 hours of student teaching.  Part of this time could be as a specialty counselor at summer camp. One summer I worked at the now-defunct Camp Tanglewood in Lynbrook as one of the art counselors.

As usual, I took pictures. There was one group of girls, about fourth grade, who had a lot of tension in their group. The senior counselor always had her hands full refereeing a dispute of some sort.  She took her job seriously and did her best to keep the peace.

One day, while passing through the camp, I came across her with two girls who were obviously having an issue with each other. I stopped in my tracks, lifted my camera to my eye and just then one of the girls looked at me and I took the picture. A second later it was all over.

This one exposure wound up being one of my favorite pictures in my portfolio. It's posted here. I call it "Trouble in G4."

All of my pictures were taken with a manual film camera. Since I'm still living in 1982 for some reason, I have no desire to switch to digital. It's not entirely because I'm stuck in the past, another reason is consumer digital cameras are just not designed for the serious photographer. Only the high-end, professional digital cameras are and a body costs about $1,000 and a lens costs about another $1,000. When I go out shooting, I often take three lenses with me. That would be about four grand to "upgrade" to digital.

The reason why the consumer cameras aren't designed for people like me is that they don't allow you to achieve the decisive moment. My first example of this is many of the flash units on these cameras fire a "preflash" (my word) which I think is supposed to avoid red eye. So when you press the shutter release, you're not really taking the picture at that moment. The preflash fires for at least a full second and then the real flash fires and the picture is taken.

As stated in my previous blog, a second is far too long. That decisive moment may be long gone by the time the actual picture is taken.

Another example is some cameras, after taking a picture, freeze the image on the screen so you can look at it. It stays there for about five seconds, ceasing your ability to shoot another shot. Imagine you're there, the decisive moment is right before your very eyes but your camera won't let you shoot it. Not very efficient, is it?

My sister lent me her digital camera. She understands the decisive moment. When I saw right away that I couldn't shoot another shot immediately after the first one, and pointed that out, she agreed the decisive moment wasn't going to get photographed with this camera. I said, "This is a toy."

Her husband said the camera costs $750. That's a very expensive toy.

So for now I will continue to shoot film with my old, workhorse cameras that allow me to capture the decisive moment when it comes my way.

I thank you for reading this and for everyone who recommended my previous blog on their Facebook pages.

For more of my photography, visit DavidPaone.com.