Part of the beauty of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa was how they were able to capture moments. On film, it’s a rare skill to capture those everyday moments by clicking on the shutter at precisely the right moment. The invention of photography alone didn’t allow us to capture these moments and stop time forever though. It was a slow evolution. In the early years of photography, daguerreotypes required the subjects to sit still for hours, which is why no one smiles in those photographs. I thought they were just upset about their misery-filled life without iPods and airplanes. With such a slow capture of time, it was difficult to instantly capture moments.

Fast forward to the late 90’s, when we still shot photographs with film, we still took care with every single one of those 36 shots available on a roll:
Compose> Adjust> Focus> Check composition> Focus> Double Check> Recompose> Shoot
Picking up the roll of film after development, the photographs held in your hands, you’d flip through one-by-one-by-one. There were some duds, but every shot was still precious-enough, to grab your attention for a tiny while. Capturing moments was still the skill of masters, ones with the quick finger-eye-shutter-coordination created magnificent works.

Taking one thousand photographs would’ve cost you $300 back then. Previous photographers who could shoot rolls and rolls of film for $0 without limit were photojournalists who were subsidized by their organizations. They weren’t necessarily masters, but increased their chances of capturing the right moment with the increase in volume. Modern day cost of one photograph has been reduced to near $0, like the photojournalists, there’s no reason to stop pressing the camera shutter every second if you want to capture a moment. Mastery of capturing-the-moment has been replaced by the ability to edit-the-content. It’s about being able to sift through the mass quantity of photographs to pick the good-stuff. With this refocus on ‘editing’ as the skilled editors emerges, the standards for the “good-stuff” should increase dramatically. Part of the creative process, especially for designers, will be to develop and highly tune our eye to edit, to find and create the good-stuff, not just the good-enough-stuff.