Today’s Decisive Moment
At 14:28:44 EST, I saw it.
Not the photograph, not yet—but the possibility of one. A human element separating itself from the storm of the street. My buddy crouched outside, camera in position. I recognized the posture immediately. I’ve been there myself countless times.
At 14:29:10 EST, it was gone.
Twenty-six seconds. Fifteen frames. And then the world rearranged itself, as it always does.
This is the part that often gets misunderstood when we talk about the decisive moment. It isn’t a sniper shot. It isn’t a single click delivered with supernatural reflexes. As I’ve written before in my reflections on Henri Cartier-Bresson, the decisive moment is rarely about speed. It’s about recognition—about knowing why something matters before you understand how you frame it.
What I saw wasn’t action. It was solitude.
A photographer alone, briefly detached from everything except the act of seeing. No audience. No performance. Just a quiet negotiation between eye, mind, and intuition. That was the story I wanted to tell—not what he was photographing, but what it looks like to be lost in the pursuit of photography itself.
So I stayed with it.
Fifteen images became three. Not because the others were failures, but because the story began to clarify itself. I wasn’t editing for sharpness or novelty. I was editing for intent.
Those three were then shaped—cropped into a 17×6 aspect ratio. Not to be clever. Not to be cinematic for the sake of it. But to remove everything that didn’t belong to the moment as I experienced it. The tighter frame forced discipline. It asked a harder question: What is essential here?
Three became one.
That final image isn’t about timing in the mechanical sense. It’s about alignment. Head, eye, heart—working together long enough for meaning to surface. The shutter didn’t create the moment; it confirmed it.
This is why the decisive moment can’t be rushed, and why it can’t be taught as a trick. You can only prepare yourself to recognize it when it quietly taps you on the shoulder and says, this is it—if you’re paying attention.
Today, I was paying attention.