picture – Random Thoughts from Behind the Lens

Anyone who knows me or has ever spent any time in my company knows one thing for sure, I am rarely on time, other people’s time that is. I have my own very distinctive rhythm in my life and my attitude is that time doesn’t really exist. It exists only in a relative world and from the standpoint of clocks and people using it as a reference point so they can have meetings etc. but ultimately my belief is that time doesn’t exist. If I show up someplace does it really matter the time? I am there and whatever sequence of events happening at that particular moment is all that matters. That moment is all that matters. When I take a pictere it’s a confluence of events occurring at the particular moment that I liberate with my camera.

Simply, whenever I arrive is precisely the right moment for me to be there.

The picture is waiting to be taken by me and my unique perspective. I’m not wondering what my watch says when I take a photograph. I’m wondering how the light is casting itself on my subject and what is happening inside the frame of the photo which reflects my frame of consciousness.

Timing is everything when taking a picture. A still photo is capturing a single moment in time, which reflects everything going on in my vision at that moment. This was done beautifully by Henri Cartier-Bresson, an iconic influence of my photography.

Cartier-Bresson coined the term, The Decisive Moment, as “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. Oop-la! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”

Life is a series of unrepeatable moments. Only through a photo can we bring ourselves back to that particular moment in time. And even then, it’s still not the moment, but a mere representation of it.

Tag: picture

The Punctual Photographer