Moment for Framing, 2014

Photography is not like painting. There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.

That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever. ~ Henri Cartier Bresson, interview with The Washington Post, 1957

Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1932

French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photographs reveal an uncanny eye for tension and symmetry, displaying finely tuned coordination between eye and finger on the shutter-release. His work has come to define the “decisive moment” in photography.” Though I don’t see myself as a street photographer (and I wish many people with cameras didn’t either), I have been influenced by the idea expressed in the Cartier-Bretton quote above.

“F8 and be there,” a phrase variously attributed to Allen Hopkins, Robert Capa, and Arthur Fellig, aka Weegee, is often used by photographers when asked how to best “capture the moment.” The tongue-in-cheek answer is sort of in the same category as George Mallory’s* “Because it’s there,” his answer to a reporter’s query “Why climb Everest?” The British mountaineer’s now-famous dictum is not that opaque to other climbers, who recognize the meaning within: If you have to ask, no answer I can give would clarify the impulse for you.

We can glean a few technical details from the photographers’ dictum, however. An aperture setting of f/8.0 will get you a reasonable amount of depth field, i.e. sharpness in front of and behind the point of focus (depending on subject distance) and, generally speaking, optimum sharpness for a given lens. But that tells us nothing about the being in the right place at the right time. And no one can impart that skill — a kind of visual intelligence — to the aspiring photographer.

If I can relay any advice to those wanting to “freeze a moment in time,” a moment that might transcend the mundane or, better yet, reveal the extraordinary within things we take for granted — then it is this: the experienced photographer enhances her chances of success by anticipating a moment of serendipity.

The featured photograph was made on a street corner in Victoria’s James Bay, a neighbourhood I’d lived in for 10-years at the time. I’d passed this scene hundreds of times. As I recall, and going on the chronology of files, I’d spent a couple of days around the intersection, toting my camera. I made 8 exposures from this spot, using a technique I’ve used over many years: a small aperture, fast film (or ISO) and slow shutter speed, to render the whole scene in focus while blurring passersby. I’ve already decided what I want to frame; I wait for chance to provide the rest. And, yes, I set the camera’s aperture to f8. 🙂

I think this genre of photography can be practised and improved, like every other motor skill … which answers to another question often asked by beginners: How can I develop my photography skills? Shoot, shoot, and shoot some more. And take heart; Cartier Bresson also said, “Your first 10,000 photographs are the worst.”

*George Herbert Leigh Mallory followed that passion to Everest 3 times in the 1920s, disappearing into the clouds in 1924 with rope mate Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, not far from the summit. In 1999, climber Conrad Anker, with the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition, found Mallery’s frozen body at 26,760 ft (8,157 m) on the north face of the mountain.