“My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.”
— Steve McCurry
I took this photo on a rainy early morning in Montreal last April. Still sleepy, I’d picked up a take-out coffee and walked a block when I spied this scene (corner of René-Lévesque and Metcalfe). I took a few shots and walked on, not really giving it much conscious thought. Generally, I don’t review my shots immediately after I take them and I keep the review feature on my camera turned off. That can be a bad thing if something went wrong in the shot, like a misfocus or some small detail that I failed to notice ruins the photo, but I found long ago that “chimping” disrupts my flow so I don’t do it very often. As a matter of fact, it’s a sign that I’m in the zone if it doesn’t even occur to me to review what I just shot. Because of this, I didn’t notice that the young woman in the distance was raising her hand when I took the shot until weeks later when I processed the photo.