Digital BW, The Print

C J Morgan writes:

> But in practice, we don't always know when the best
> "decisive moment" is going to be. We might be able
> to narrow it down to within a few second just before
> we start shooting. But we can't always predict which
> very specific moment is going to be the absolute best.

Except for the most rapidly animated scenes, I can't see a use for
things like motor drives.  I'm sure it has its application in sports,
but beyond that, it's hard to see the utility.  Perhaps for some types
of wildlife photography or something.

The fastest type of photography I've done is fashion photography, and
even in that case, I've never found a use for motor drive.  As long as
you don't have too much shutter lag and you know what you are shooting
well enough to anticipate a bit, shooting single frames at a time seems
to provide great results.

And, as I've pointed out, HCB, who coined the term of the decisive
moment, doesn't use rapid-fire motor drives.  And while he is talented,
he is not unique.  A great many photographers manage to get excellent
photos without shooting hundreds or thousands of them at a time.  Even
sports photographers often claim that it's not a matter of shooting lots
of frames, but of simply knowing when to press the shutter for that one
good frame (and that seems plausible to me, although I don't do sports
photography and cannot comment from personal experience).

I suppose for those who don't find sorting images to be as tedious as I
do, shooting more of them may be an option.  On occasions when I've
tried this, however, looking at a dozen nearly-identical versions of the
same image has rapidly tired me.  I do occasionally shoot the same scene
in several different ways, but not with a motor-drive whirring away, and
always with substantially different viewpoints, composition, etc., so
that the different images really are quite different on the light table.