Chris Dodkin
West Coast Correspondent
Eric Kim has just posted a fascinating blog post, concerning the “myth of the decisive moment”. He suggests that one of the common misunderstandings that plague many street photographers, (including himself), was the decisive moment simply being one shot. Now, after studying many contact sheets from the Magnum Contact Sheets book, he was able to explode the myth of that decisive moment.
How Studying Contact Sheets Can Make You a Better Street Photographer
Henri Cartier-Bresson defines “The Decisive Moment” as follows:
“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.”
However, Henri Cartier-Bresson didn’t only take one single photograph when he saw a decisive moment ready to happen (David Hurn refers to this as a “pregnant moment“) but rather took several images of the same scene.
And getting access to those contact sheets allows you to see how the decisive moment developed, and how it was selected from a set of images taken at each location.
Fascinating stuff, and very useful in everyday shooting.
How Studying Contact Sheets Can Make You a Better Street Photographer
Henri Cartier-Bresson defines “The Decisive Moment” as follows:
“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.”
However, Henri Cartier-Bresson didn’t only take one single photograph when he saw a decisive moment ready to happen (David Hurn refers to this as a “pregnant moment“) but rather took several images of the same scene.
And getting access to those contact sheets allows you to see how the decisive moment developed, and how it was selected from a set of images taken at each location.
Fascinating stuff, and very useful in everyday shooting.
