Decisive Moment - Final Pick

I think I may have slightly preferred the picture of my cat, but with help from people in class I decided on the woman waiting for the BART train during rush hour. It has a nice understated beauty.

I do usually try to avoid picking cat pictures as my favorites because I know the subject matter is not as interesting if they are not your cats. Pictures on blogs are fair game though.

The following is some of the thought process that went into picking this shot over the others I took of her.

Some people in class were wondering where all the other people were since it was during rush hour. Most of the people were on different parts of the platform,but there was a girl standing near her. I just quickly decided that I preferred the lone woman so I cropped the teen out with my lens.

The first image was from my initial shooting before the girl came. It was hard to get the exposure exactly right, especially since I did not have a tri-pod and was originally alternating shots from diffent angles of the platform. I allways shoot in full manual so each new angle required some tinkering. It's intresting how the shot I picked (the 4th one) has a very diffrent feel than the frame that followed even though she only moved slightly. That's part of what makes documentary photography so hard; you have little or no controll of what happens and the setting, but even a slight astetic change can make or break a shot.

I would have picked one of these shots as my favorite except the frames with the best action and shape were blurry. I set up the shot in anticipation of the action and held down the shutter taking a series of frames. The only problem was I apparenly moved slightly fowards or backwords because some are out of foucs.