Osler's Razor

[click on the image to enlarge it]

One thing I liked about my dad's TV interview (in the post below) was that the interviewer seemed to ask the questions people most often wonder about.  One of them was this:  How do you capture that moment?

My dad kind of shrugs it off in the interview, saying "click click click," to suggest he just takes a ton of pictures and snags the best one, but that isn't really true.  He knows the moment to capture, and waits for it.  I've seen him do it.  Often, I'm startled by the moment he has chosen, until I see the image.  Then it makes sense; he has caught some truth in that moment that didn't exist a fraction of a minute before or after.  You can see this in the pictures that are in his book-- they are of these moments that tell a story, the story of that spare small fraction of time.  What he does well is not so much color or composition or even subject... it is timing.

Trying to teach students at Baylor how to try a case, I used to urge them to find that moment, that image, that tells their story, and to leave that as the image that lingers for the jury.  It was mostly futile; I didn't see them do it much.  I realize now that my failure was this:  I skipped a step, the step where I would have explained that there even was such a moment, that it did exist, and that it mattered.  

It does, because that is all this short life is made of.