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Greedy moments

Never being satisfied is part of the job description, and that’s where so often the idea of moment comes in, elevating an already-good scene with something, like an alignment, that depends on getting just the right moment in a changing situations.

There are certain scenes that, when you come across them, just seem right, and you know that you have a picture. You shoot, and it’s in the can, but then greed takes over. This was early morning by the banks of the Kaveri River in India’s Karnataka. There was fog, and even better it was at that stage of beginning to clear, when you have some visibility, and it delivers images. A farmer had led his cow (he had only one? I didn’t ask) to the shallows to drink, and the scene was as simple as a small watercolor painting. Just three things in view: the farmer, the cow, and behind a kinked palm tree. Nothing else, and all out of a pale gray, an almost-white.

Even from the first shot, 180mm, closing in on just the three elements and obviously a natural vertical, it was good for me. It was the kind of reduced, near-minimalist setting that I like because it’s not so common, and because you can always make it look graphically strong.

Leading cow to water
Indian farmer with cow, Karnataka, India 1981

Quite quickly, this being India, where anonymity is near-impossible for photographers, the man turned to look at me. I visited this kind of situation a few weeks ago here, with the girl sitting on the bench in Cartagena in front of the yellow wall. Here too, I had mixed feelings. Received opinion says you’ve lost it when the subject sees you, and so you’d better move on, but I quite liked his forthright stance. Even so, I waited for him to lose interest and get back to tending the cow. You can’t art-direct a scene like this. If you tried to, it would collapse into farce. The best you can do is wait it out and move a bit to make the most of whatever positions you get.

A matter of alignment.
The isolating effect of fog, described in the text, made the relationships between elements much simpler, and encouraged, in my mind at least, a search for alignment, which in the last frame succeeded.

I saw the possibility of lining up the palm tree and the man at the start, although because man and cow were close together it wasn’t very strong. Then, when he faced me for a short while, it became a simpler triangular possibility, with the palm tree just standing behind the double unit of man and cow. Finally, when the positions of man and cow were reversed and he turned to face the animal, his profile was more linear, and the alignment made more sense. What finally drew it all together was the way he eventually stood, with the top of his back and shoulder curved—an echo of the curve in the palm tree’s trunk. This kind of alignment and coincidence does more for some people than others, but I have to admit that I like it, and also think it takes an image up a notch. That much more work and thought went into it.

Did I continue to shoot even after I had the shot that clearly worked? Of course I did. That’s the nature of being greedy for images.

The shooting sequence

The moments leading up to the final shot are all good, or at least acceptable, in their way, simply lacking that exact graphic coincidence.

Michael FreemanOther articles by author

In a 40 year career, internationally renowned photographer and author Michael Freeman has focused on documentary travel reportage, and has been published in all major publications worldwide, including Time-Life, GEO and a 30-year relationship with the Smithsonian magazine. He is also the world’s top author of photography books, drawing on his long experience.
In total, he has published 133 books, with 4 million copies sold, including 66 on the craft of photography, published in 27 languages. With an MA in Geography from Oxford University, Freeman went first into advertising before launching his career in editorial photography with a journey up the Amazon.

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