Belly dancer...

I've talked before about the circumstances of chance in photography. Some photographers in the past have talked about the genius of being able to capture "the" moment.

Most noticeable of those photographers was arguably Cartier Bresson. He called it: "the decisive moment".

While I'll agree that Mr. Bresson's photos are different and that there is an intrinsic quality about them, I think it’s a huge leap to say that he was able to pick off this moment using some sort of technique, or savoir-faire (you know, him being french and all).

As with Shakespeare’s poems being reproducible by an army of a million monkeys with a million typewriters; I think that if you shoot enough everyday occurrences, you are bound to shoot something of interest. Especially with digital - where there are no relevant costs in shooting more frames - I believe this holds even more true.

I like to believe in a more introspective type of photography. I see photography as philosophy whereas video is physics. You try to capture, but then you are left to interpret it more than anything else.

By this, I don’t mean that I’ve eluded all possibilities of randomness, because you really can’t. There is really no way of knowing for sure what you got on tape (or on file, whatever).

I mean, let’s be real, where talking about thousandth of a second. We can’t really comprehend time in this scale, let alone capture it.

Joel Meyerowitz said that all cameras have clocks, and if you believe that you can tell what a 1000th of a second is, you start believing that you can capture it.

While I respect Mr Meyerowitz immensely, I think it’s more a question of faith than of technique or hand-eye coordination capability.

Am I wrong?... has been known to happen.

I was shooting the belly dancer in natural light (which I love - err, shooting in natural light, not necessarily belly dancers). At the precise moment I shot this, a flash from another camera, operated by another person, with whom I had no communication whatsoever, went off! How could I've predicted this?

This is the beauty of the random in photography. Its beauty is in direct relation with our inability to replicate.

This photo was taken with a DSLR in Dubai.