Beyond the Lens- The Decisive Moment

Written by Tamara Kwan of TammyLynn Photography

Featured on I am Gloucestershire 365's website under FYI Daily Blog on Thursday 2, December 2010

If you google ‘The Decisive Moment’ you’ll more than likely see Henri Cartier-Bresson’s name at the top of the list along with his photograph titled ‘Behind the Gare St. Lazare’ of a man jumping accross some water and just about to make a splash. My image above reminds me of his image.

What is ‘The Decisive Moment’? Besides being a book by Henri Cartier-Bresson? Well it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s the moment in which you decide to press the shutter and capture a moment in time. The moment can sometimes make or break a photo, especially when a moment or two before or after a particular moment in time just won’t have the same impact. It’s managing to capture a story or some tension or an expression or an expectation. Like my image above, a moment later and it would have been just another splash photo. A moment before and it wouldn’t have the full impact of what is about to happen.

To me the decisive moment can also be a moment captured in time that you might not have seen other wise.

This photograph was captured hand held with a Canon 5D and 24-70mm 2.8 lens. It was a cloudy rainy day, with ISO set to 100 I still managed to shoot at 1/400^th of a second at f/2.8. I was shooting in Aperture Priority letting the camera choose the shutter speed. As most of my subjects were moving and I was mostly shooting hand held I kept a watch on the shutter speed trying to keep it above 1/200^th of a second. The 2.8 aperture of my lens helped greatly with this. As I was shooting in RAW I didn’t worry much about the white balance, though in hindsight I should have set it to daylight and saved myself a couple of clicks in post processing. But why not cloudy? It was cloudy and there is a cloudy white balance setting. Well I find that the cloudy setting more often than not leaves my images too yellowish.

The Photo above is of my friend’s daughter playing at Slimbridge WWT. No children or ducks were harmed in the making of this image.

Andy Rouse Seminar

Today was the Andy Rouse 'Visions of Light' Seminar out at Slimbridge WWT from 10am to 5:30pm. I met up with several of my photography friends that I know from the area who went as well. There was Damon the Gloucester Pet Photographer, Stephen founder of the Southern Softies from the DSLR User Forum, Derick (vice Chairman) from the Stroud Camera Club and Liz who is also from the Stroud Camera Club.

What a fantastic day! I thoroughly enjoyed myself and learned loads. Andy Rouse is a great speaker, down to earth and honest. He showed us how he does things and worked on a few of his photos as examples of what he does and explained why he does it. He was a joy and an inspiration to listen too. During the seminar we had a 2 hour break to go out and take photos in the park. Here are a few of my favourite photos from the day that I took:

Carols and a Photo Competiton

Last night was practice for the up coming annual Cycle Carol Service in Cam. Peter is playing the organ this year with Nicki accompanying him on her trumpet and Sue leading the chorus and singing a solo. They came over last night to practice and it was great fun. Mark also came by and stayed for the singing and my daughter couldn't resist joining in as well. She even got her drum kit out and played along. I can't sing so I provided the cakes and mulled wine and coffee for everyone. Was loads of fun, we should do this more often. :-D

This Saturday I'm going to a Visions of Light Seminar with Andy Rouse at Slimbridge WWT. Should be very interesting and loads of fun so I'm looking forward to it. Before the day there is a photo competition we can enter with the winner being announced on the day. Today was the last day to enter and I really struggled with finding an entry. The topic was 'Visions of Light' so the main subject had to be light. It also had to be a photo with very little done to it, no fancy editing in other words. I wanted to take a fresh photo for this but the weather and my spare time did not cooperate, so I wound up trudging through past photos and came up with this one.

You can see it larger on my flickr page by clicking HERE. It was really late last night when I entered it and this morning I'm thinking why?!! I wish I kept looking a bit further. It's a nice photo of a rainbow, but it doesn't say WoW to me. So it most likely won't say WoW to the judge either, especially with all the other great awe inspiring photos that have been entered so far. Oh well, it's just a bit of fun. I'm still looking forward to the seminar. :-)

Hey got our first Christmas Card today!!! All the way from Texas to Stroud England! :-D But now I feel bad because I've not got our Christmas cards sorted yet! I'd better get on that ASAP! But first I've got a bunch of other things to get done today so I'd better get to it. Laterz! :-D