Capturing the ‘decisive moment’
Scene Through the Lens with photographer Tom Gralish.
As a news photographer, I am often chasing a moment; but my day-to-day photography is less about looking for those moments than it is about waiting for them.
Over the years I have probably spent the equivalent of a week’s worth of vacation time patiently lingering on the edge of a scene, hoping the right bike or scooter-riding, umbrella-carrying or heavy coat-wearing person will pass through my carefully composed frame. Or the “correctly” colored car.
Clearly I was inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson as I thumbed through the books in my middle school library. 770-Photography & photographs, as classified by the Dewey Decimal System. (I also browsed 737-Numismatics and 720-Architecture.)
It’s what one of the most influential photographers of the 20th Century, Cartier-Bresson, called the “decisive moment” — that instant when form, meaning, and motion align.
I am always observing the world around me and often, while backed up in rush hour traffic driving on the Ben Franklin Bridge, I’ve noticed (in my peripheral vision) the PATCO commuter train next to us, zipping by.
This week as a passenger on that train traveling at 40 mph during an off-hour, I noted the cars were moving faster (vehicular speed limit 45 mph), so I grabbed my camera (Nikon Z-6II with a 24-70mm lens, ISO 500) to play with some “panning.”
That’s a technique of moving the camera during a slow exposure while following a moving subject. Usually, while standing still, I would pivot smoothly at the waist, trying to get in sync with whatever is crossing in front of me. Done correctly the result is a picture where the subject remains relatively sharp and the background is blurred.
Aiming out the window as we crossed the bridge I started experimenting with different settings to get that balance right between the camera/train and subject motion, changing them as different cars passed by.Usually the “moment” results with patience.
Sometimes I just get lucky. And on this day the right camera settings and the right car happened at the same time.Later at my laptop, I checked the digital metadata. I got lucky and hit that sweet spot with a shutter speed of 1/25th second at an aperture of f/22.
Even luckier it was a little red car (and a yellow school bus!) as you can believe someone who waits a lot for such things, most cars these days are black.
As a news photographer, it was also a lucky day for me — not so for SEPTA commuters — as I was heading to the train station right after a transformer fire halted service on the subway in Center City Philadelphia for a couple of hours.
Since 1998 a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in the print editions of The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color: