When I turned the corner in this little used court yard, I couldn’t help but feel as if this scene were waiting for me. That the storm drains had been placed just so in anticipation of some yahoo coming through with his camera to take their picture. When I find stuff like this, I immediately realize that a single frame of film needs to be dedicated to it, as it’s just begging for exposure.

I would think that for other photographers who practice their craft on a daily, or even weekly basis, the feeling is the same. For some it’s a street scene where all the people in the photo have converged to a particular street corner just so that they may be photographed, or for others a field of wild flower whose seeds have been sewn just in time to coincide with the arrival of the camera.

Bresson referred to it as the decisive moment, and I won’t attempt to take a thing away from that concept, except to ask if it isn’t a little bit more like the divine moment? Now I’m not saying that stumbling across three storm drains is akin to being touched by the finger of God, only that sometimes I can’t help but wonder if all of our photographs were meant to be and that the forces of divine intervention have placed all the major players in front of our camera to make it so.

3 storm gutters.jpg