WHAT ARE YOUR INTENTIONS?

By MICHAEL PERKINS

A picture in which an activity is implied, but is not yet fully underway….

PHOTOGRAPHERS HAVE FILLED ENTIRE LIBRARIES with commentary on what has become commonly referred to as “the decisive moment”, that one instant plucked judiciously from the infinite dots-on-a-line progression of time by shooters who have mastered the art of predicting when that precise second is approaching, then capturing it in a box before it’s gone. It’s a wonderful ideal. A seductive fantasy. And beyond the reach of most of us, even the great artists.

We keep hoping that photography will, if we really try, actually be reducible to a science. We dream about bringing the same degree of control to it that we might bring to splitting the atom. There’s a right way and a wrong way. Absolute failure or absolute success. Which begs the question, who lives in that world? Most of us try to keep our images within a bracket of acceptable results. We mostly produce kinda/sorta/almost/pretty close pictures. We get as near to the ideal as our weird mixture of skill and random fate will allow.

I certainly can’t claim that many of my own shots are so marvelously timed as to qualify for “decisive moment” status. Most of the time, in reviewing a shoot, I go through the same trial and error process that my optometrist (a licensed professional, mind you!) uses in prescribing glasses for me. Show the patient one lens, and then another one that’s nearly the same, and then a third lens based on whichever of the first two he chooses, and so on. Is this better…..or this? This….or this?

Now things are rolling a bit. More kids, more direct action.

In shooting rapidly changing subjects, such as the kids in these pictures, you often get a large number of shots that are “almost there”. There actually may not be a clear winner among them, but we drive ourselves crazy trying to determine which one came the closest to grabbing the brass ring. In the cast of these young explorers, I only had time to crank off two frames. The one at the top of the page signaled that they were up to something, but the second, just above, shows each child in a distinctly individual activity, with a variety of poses arranged in a more balanced form and with a few more than in the smaller group, making for a little more dynamic or “busy” frame, or at least one which is composed to suggest action. Neither shot is a masterpiece, but yet my mind wants one to be a clear favorite. Human nature, I guess. It’d be wonderful if I could rip off a picture that seems inevitable, as if it could only have been shot just that way, in just that second. A decisive moment. But here we are in the real world, where, sometimes, if we come within a country mile of what we intended, the whole day’s a win.