What Makes a Great Picture? Henri Cartier-Bresson. 

Rupert, this is one of my favorite photos as well. I've heard many people talk about this photo but most gloss over what I think is an important point. I tend to think of a photo as having a foreground, middle ground and background. If I raise my camera up, I increase the middle ground portion; if I lower it I decrease it. The lower my camera goes the less middle ground I see. I believe Cartier Bresson is on his knees or in a chair when this shot is taken. The result is I feel like I'm in the middle of the children playing. Another result is that people on the compressed background look bigger than they really are - an optical illusion. The man walking through, I think is not as tall as our eyes tell us. And I boy who's behind him would have to be very big indeed. Like Erwitt's dogs who followed, Bresson is down low to the level of the children. He's showing us the children's world. That's my take on it. Great video. And thanks! Bill

You continue to help me sharpen my photographic vision, looking for decisive moments. Thanks.

Thanks Rupert as always. Brilliant video. And thanks a lot for the pdf sharing!

More. Yep. We want more of these.

Absolutely superb!

HCB aka the eye of the world

Thank you

Excellent video as always , thanks.

What makes that “candid” photo magical to me is the only way I could ever imagine replicating it would be to place a dozen small photos of people on a larger print of a building with small windows (and if I couldn’t find such a building then maybe I could cut/pasted tiny windows onto a white background???)

The video was 6 minutes but that catalogue will take me hours.............

first, useful video!

Not sure why, but the windows make me think of Piet Mondrean,

HCB is no stranger to cropping the image to fit his narrative. Indeed, most of his work are cropped or straightened.

If you don't crop, that implies coercing the subject into unnatural shapes. That makes no sense to me. Not every scene happily conforms to the 3x2 of my Lumix S1R or the 4x3 of my Lumix G9. Some want to be 2x1 with someone on the edge, some want to be square, perhaps with someone gazing out of frame.

That photograph does not look real to me