To me, focusing on a Cartier-Bresson style basically frees the photographer from the need of much gear. You need a camera, and the smaller the better. Therefore, the supersized SLRs are really fighting against you on this point. Though point and shoot cameras are smaller, I think they can almost be totally disqualified for another reason: you need instant response. When you press the button, the camera fires. Period.

Even the most basic DSLRs will do that. I would suggest that frames per minute, or how fast you could take these shots, does not really matter much either. It may help at times, but more than likely, you will slowly get lazy, knowing you can fire off five or six shots, in hopes that the decisive moment was in there somewhere and that you might have hit it. You simply need to be able to release that shutter when your instincts say the moment is going to happen.

As for lenses, a variety of lenses in the bag can help, but speaking of Cartier-Bresson who basically only used a 50mm, you do not necessarily even need anything more than a 50mm f/1.8 or f/1.4. For years, I captured photos on an all-manual film camera with my one 50mm f/1.7 lens, and I still feel the photos I took then have something my newer photos do not…but that gets into another topic. Why use me as an example, though. You have Cartier-Bresson and a host of other greats.

It is more about the moment than the gear. I have looked at some incredible photos. They were overly contrasty, full of grain, and out of focus, but they caught that moment. You know the famous Normandy Beach photo, right? I cannot think of a better example. Vietnam has it’s share, too.

I will not get into the rangerfinder versus SLR debate, but from the criteria above, clearly, both have a place, both have inherent strengths and weaknesses. Use what you have. Focus on capturing that moment instead of what gear you need.

Well, so I do not overload you with a long post here (because if you actually follow that link and read his post, it is already quite long), I will cut to the chase. The Strobist post was good, but I very much liked the e-mail he left a link to near the bottom of the site. This was an e-mail from a friend of Mr. Stobist (David Hobby) who was passionately explaining his idea of developing documentary (story telling) photographers by teaching them “how to create decent photojournalism using Bressonian decisive moment style.”

Just in the last post, I mentioned Henri Cartier-Bresson, right? Here I have stumbled across him again. Well, I guess that should not come as any huge shock; he was, by most accounts, one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, after all. Why was he famous, though? Aha, so we get to it. He was all about catching the decisive moment, that was his motto, of sorts.

The guy who was e-mailing with Mr. Stobist was one of the creators (I do not know anything about them, but at the very least, he was one of the creators) of Momenta Workshops, which uses “photography as a force of change”. One the main themes in that document was that the tools necessary to tell the stories are accessible to all of us. For a very minimal investment, we can be documenting stories that really should be told. Instead of gawking at the newest National Geographic, maybe we should be learning how to tell the stories nobody else is going to tell.

That quote above, though, said it all for me. I may never be pro, and honestly the more I know about being a pro photog, the more I tend to not want to be a pro, but I can still create “decent photojournalism”. Now, I have never seen Time or NatGeo show up in the places I have lived, so who is going to tell the story?

And the second half of the quote guides us to a huge solution: “using Bressonian decisive moment style”. In other words, teaching budding photographers to stop shooting randomly allowing the equipment to think for you, and start reading situations and people, feeling the moment, and focusing entirely on catching the “decisive moment” that tells the story. Piece a few decisive moments together, and you have a quality story worth telling.

Now, I am by no means the first to bring this topic up, I would not delude myself to believe so. I have read it on the Strobist, in history flicks about the greats of photography (notably Henri Cartier-Bresson), and as I just mentioned, from Doug Menuez…among many others. We must force ourselves to get that film-shooting edge, but how do we do that?

Well, you could shoot some film. Just a thought.

You know your aperture ring, you shutter speed dial, and your focus so well, you are setting up for the shot about to happen without looking at the camera. You do not need the display in your viewfinder to tell you, you know where your settings are. You do not need some computer to tell you how to expose the shot.

And after all that technical garbage, you realize the photo is about much more than the settings. It is that decisive moment. You are reading the situation, waiting for that moment, and when it happens, you take your shot. That one shot will be much better than dozens of machine gunned images. Know what you want and press that shutter when you want.

Now, I have to stay digital. It really is not an option. Well, if I want to see my images in less than half a year (literally), this is what I need to do. What I am struggling to fight against, though, is the subtle slide into digital laziness.

So, I challenge myself every once in a while. Shoot manual exposure every once in a while; it’s good for you. Manual focus, even. Wow, wild stuff, I know. Last night, on my outing for the midnight shoot (which I talked more about on Twitter @CooperStrange), I thought, “hey, what if I had to choose film before hand?” So, I chose my ISO ahead of time and decided they were going to be black and white. Even though that is quite arbitrary in the digital world, it would be a basic decision if I had to choose which film to load into the camera.

I pre-visualized the shots in black and white, which I might add, was not all that hard since it was so dark and it was in a factory that produces a white powder. The scene was almost black and white in real life! I did not want to shoot a high ISO just to “give it that cool, old, film grain look”, because the folks in the old days did not shoot ISO just because of the cool grain. They wanted crisp photos, but needed the high ISO film for some shoots. So, I went with 400.

And to top if all off, I have not looked at one of those shots yet. It is kind of like waiting for the lab. Doug Menuez mentioned this wait. It is good for us. It helps break the chimping addiction (constantly viewing your LCD to check out your shots). It is also good for us at a much deeper level, developing patience. I think you could even argue it helps encourage our brains to be more visual and think ahead, to pre-visualize, but that is just a thought.

Don’t be digi-lazy. Be film sharp.