Take a scene that already looks good, whichever way you decide to shoot it. Then remove the pressure of shooting quickly, because the action is constant and you have time to hang around for as long as you want. What remains is still the need to catch the most telling moment within the scene.

This is, or rather was, the old commodities exchange in Calcutta behind the Writers’ Building, a bizarre and at first glance chaotic place, with great camera appeal. There were a few immediately obvious picture possibilities, starting with the overall street scene, which included the occasional cow wandering aimlessly around. One approach—the first that presented itself, in fact—was from behind the crowd outside, and I started with that (see the smaller picture here). But the heart of the action was the very old-fashioned, and picturesque form of trading, with two tiers of tiny traders’ boxes set into a blue-painted wall. It was so inherently strong as a scene that almost any treatment would be good, and I was spoiled for choice. This, naturally, was the first pitfall to overcome, because of the temptation simply to go for the graphic, boxes-framed-in-blue treatment, and leave it at that. There was an obvious attraction in a medium-telephoto shot that would isolate two or more of the little windows, each with a framed trader, set in a blue background that would extend to the edges of the picture frame.

It seemed natural to close in so that the frame would fill with blue, and I could have a few black boxes with figures neatly inside them. I wanted to explore the graphics of the situation, which was, after all, visually unusual—men boxed against a blue background. The first step was to get into a position where I could shoot face-on to the wall of boxes, the next to move in until I had a neat framing with my one medium-telephoto prime lens, a 180 mm Nikkor, the classic across-the-street lens (there were no good quality zooms in the 1980s!).

Any shot from this viewpoint would be fine, but even so, there would be a significant difference between a shot that was timed for a telling moment and a shot that ignored the possibilities of gesture. This, after all, is India, where people generally use gestures in a particular way. More than that, this is a trading scene, and the range of hand gestures was wide and full of character. Hands and arms were moving around even more distinctively than usual. Communications were basically between the men in the boxes and those on the street—the pavement trading floor if you like. It would be too easy to be fixated on the graphic prettiness of the scene, but I wanted to include some partial explanation of what was going on—the trading, in other words.

Having found my framing, I was looking for several gestures happening in one frame, and in particular an occasion when one of the traders in a box was dealing with someone standing on the ground in the street. I waited for action. In the end, the best moment came when an arm pointed upwards from street level, matched by the pointing finger of the trader at right. Framing this shot to take in more of the man in the street would have been more explanatory, but less interesting. The two arms pointing at each other do the job.

It’s a very simple lesson to learn from a scene like this. However strong the graphics and colour of a situation, if there are people involved there will always be a difference of moment. With people as the subject, the importance of moment never goes away. There’s no best moment, as the photographer’s own taste comes into play, but there are clearly going to be some better moments, and catching one of these completes the shot.