The Perfect Moment

Paris is Most Beautiful in the Rain

With 2011 just gone, it seems an appropriate time for many people to do a retrospective of their best shots of the year. The difficulty for me in doing the same is that I now tend to keep my very best work in the bag, to be released as publications, blog articles or competition entries when their time has arrived. The buzz I used to feel for immediately showing my latest and greatest has diminished with time. For me, travel and landscape photography is still a completely self-driven endeavour; I shoot only for myself. If I derive enjoyment from my results, then I am satisfied. If I don’t, no amount of accolades from the outside world will convince me otherwise. It is interesting to see how letting images stew for months or even years has on one’s perception of them. You grow more fond of the best ones. Unfortunately many others don’t fair so well over time.

For the first time in many years, my favourite image has nothing to do with nature photography. Instead it falls equally appropriately into the categories of either travel or street photography. The title “Paris is Most Beautiful in the Rain” comes from a line in Woody Allen’s latest movie “Midnight in Paris”. I actually watched the movie on my return to Australia, about a week after making this photo. There were many aspects of this film and its main character, Gil Pender which I identified with. It was a wonderful coincidence that the final scene of the film takes place on the same bridge as my photo, both in the rain.

This was one of those elusive ‘perfect moments’ that I have only experienced a handful of times as a photographer. It was captured on a day which I had not expected to take any photos. A friend had arrived from London and we were showing her around Paris for the day. During the afternoon, a thunderstorm very suddenly appeared over the city. The deluge that followed caught almost everyone unawares. Umbrellas were useless against the horizontal wall of water that had girls screaming and everyone running full pelt to find some shelter. We eventually found respite at a construction site where the workers kindly allowed many wet and soggy people to stand under the scaffolding. After several minutes, I asked myself why I wasn’t out there in the rain photographing people’s reaction to all this. I spent the next 20 minutes in the autumn shower, soaked to the bone with water in my shoes, thunder and lightning cracking above. This image depicts the moment after the sea of clouds had parted to reveal the sun, backlighting the raindrops so that they appeared like a shower of diamonds in the air. These details really do need to be seen in the large version on the website gallery found here. Many elements had to come together for this image and the result you see here is the full-frame image without any manipulations or cloning.

It is the imperfect moments which prepare the photographer for the perfect moment.

Otherwise how do we learn to anticipate its arrival, recognise the potential for it to occur and finally to make an adequate execution of the craft so that the moment doesn’t slip from one’s grasp? These perfect instances remain intangible until the photographer has completed his task. If the composition is not compelling or the technique poor, that moment will no longer be perceived as perfect.

Here’s hoping that everyone gets their perfect moment in 2012!