Decisive moments
For other examples:
Henri Cartier-Bresson p. 11
Marc Asnin p. 13
Cristina Garcia Rodero p. 15
Maciej Dakowicz p. 116
A man walks into frame with a cockatoo perched on his shoulder. A Rottweiler on the prowl glances to the right. A couple embrace and a character seemingly exhausted by life slumps in the middle of the frame. What kind of strange New York allegory is this?
Here, Melanie Einzig captures four very separate, unrelated ‘elements’ as they come together for a single moment. A second later and this beautifully odd quartet would have moved on, never to meet again.
Knowing exactly when to press the shutter is one of the single most important aspects of photography. It’s what Henri Cartier-Bresson called the ‘decisive moment’ – arresting photographic instances so fleeting, they come and go in the click of a finger and hopefully a camera’s shutter.
Capturing the decisive moment, whether it’s a sudden change in the light, a telling gesture or a street scene like this is all about anticipation and instinct.
If you keep your eyes peeled, you’ll soon start to see moments like this all around you. When it comes to it, you’ll have no time to think, so set your camera up in advance. You want to freeze a moment in time, so use ‘Shutter Priority’ and a fast shutter speed.
This is about as pure as photography gets.
Spring Corner, New York
Melanie Einzig
2000