Decisive Moment is a term that almost everyone who interested in photography has heard about. It is a combination of right time, dramatic scene and well composition. The Decisive Moment has become to one of the basic rules to take good pictures on street, like “Third Rule”.

Henri Cartier-Bresson is one of my main source of inspiration when I started to study photography. I spent a long time to understand this term, which I haven’t mastered yet, and try to apply it to my photographs. It requires agility and anticipation. At that time, I always held my camera, looked for the “significant event” and waited and waited for the right moment to press the shutter. Unfortunately, dramatic scenes rarely came and I missed a lot of movements.

Later I tend to shoot with High Speed Continues mood on my Canon DSLR during events. It offered me some confident because it can shoot up to 6 frames per second.  Instead of predicting the next movement of my objects, I can get all the moments that may look interesting. I could easily get hundreds of pictures in couple of hours. However, I was not pleasant because I still could not capture the perfect moment.

It took me a long time to learn that capturing decisive moment is not the only way to photograph. Those magic moments are transitory and incredible. But are many other moments that not so dramatic but still valuable and worth photographing. They could be everyday scenes, or common experiences. Ordinary does not necessary be valueless. These normal moments construct our major live. There is some sort of reality behind it.

Unlike Bresson, there are some photographers who like to record some non-special moments in our live. In Robert Frank’s book The American, he captured some common but typical scenes that may happen around us everyday. These kind of photos may reflect some reality that tend to be ignored.

Nowadays when I take photos of things happening in my live, I want to photograph from the perspective of an ordinary person, not a photography student. Most of my photos are lose and not well composed and even horizon is not horizontal. I tried forget all the techniques I have learnt. Our eyes may fool us but our feelings are always memorable. The only thing I hope to grab in my photos is my real feeling. Exposure, composition, shutter speed and view point are not important any more. In this way, some of these images are more like a glimpse rather than “normal” photographs. Also, because I usually photograph things around me, I wish people who have similar experience may the same feeling of mime or may recall certain memories of their own.