Chapter 10 — Exercises

The decisive moment is learned the hard way — on your feet, camera up, waiting for instants that arrive once and vanish. Most of these exercises send you to a corner to wait, or ask you to read the geometry of a frozen instant. A phone is a perfect tool here; the only equipment that matters is your patience. Difficulty is marked ⭐ (warm-up), ⭐⭐ (core), ⭐⭐⭐ (stretch). Do the starred and odd-numbered ones at minimum; model answers and critiques for those are in the book's Answers to Selected Exercises. Keep your near-misses as well as your keepers — comparing the frame you kept to the frames a fifth of a second on either side is the single fastest way to train your timing.

Part A — Read the Frame (the geometry of the instant)

Exercise 10.1 ⭐ — Name the moment. Find five photographs of people or animals in motion (a sports page, a news site, your own camera roll, a family album). For each, write one sentence answering: what instant was caught, and what would the frame a half-second earlier or later have looked like? You are training yourself to see that a moment was chosen out of a stream.

Exercise 10.2 ⭐⭐ — Gesture peak or near-miss? Find three frames where a person is mid-gesture (reaching, throwing, embracing, waving). For each, judge: is the gesture at its peak (most fully itself), still gathering, or already collapsing? Defend your read in a sentence. Then describe the frame that would have been the true peak.

Exercise 10.3 ⭐⭐ — Write a decisive Described Photograph. Choose one photograph of a fleeting moment that you love, and write a full Described Photograph of it using the six fields (THE FRAME / THE LIGHT / THE MOMENT / THE CHOICES / THE EFFECT / THE LESSON). Make the THE MOMENT field do real work: name the exact instant and what the frames on either side would have lost. This is the best single exercise for training your eye for time.

Exercise 10.4 ⭐⭐⭐ — Find the rhyme. Cartier-Bresson's frames often contain a visual rhyme — two shapes echoing each other in one instant (a leaping man and a leaping poster; an umbrella and the curve of an arch). Find or recall three photographs that contain such a rhyme of forms, and explain how the moment and the geometry arrive together in each. If you can't find three, that is itself a finding — describe how rare and how powerful the coincidence is.

Part B — Anticipation (Shoot This)

Exercise 10.5 ⭐ — Predict the behavior. Before touching a camera, sit at a busy spot (a crosswalk, a café, a playground) for ten minutes and just predict. Write down five small predictions before they happen — "the next person at this puddle will jump it," "that toddler is about to chase those pigeons," "the barista winds up before slamming the portafilter." Note how many came true. Human behavior is more patterned than it feels; this exercise proves it.

Exercise 10.6 ⭐⭐ — Set a trap for the light. At a busy intersection or market (one of the four locations), find a stage: a patch of good light, a reflection, a strong doorway, a clean wall with a leading line. Frame the empty stage exactly as you want it, prefocus on the spot, lock your exposure for it. Then wait and shoot every person who enters. Shoot 30, keep 3. For each keeper, write one sentence on what made that frame the moment.

Exercise 10.7 ⭐⭐ — Release a beat early. Find a repeating action you can practice on (someone shooting baskets, a dog fetching, a skateboarder landing a trick, water dripping from a tap). Deliberately practice releasing the shutter just before the peak, to swallow your reaction lag. Shoot the same action 20 times, adjusting your timing each press. Lay the frames in order and find the one that landed on the peak. Note how much earlier than "now" you had to press.

Exercise 10.8 ⭐⭐⭐ — The shot through a gap. Recreate the constraint of Figure 10.1: find a fixed frame you cannot recompose — shoot through a railing, a doorway, a gap between parked cars, an arch — so you must hold one composition and wait for a figure to complete it. Stay until someone walks into the spot where the picture exists. This forces pure anticipation: you cannot chase, only wait. Keep the best frame and one sentence on what you were waiting for.

Part C — Burst vs. the single frame (Settings Drill)

Exercise 10.9 ⭐ — Single-frame discipline. Choose a readable human moment (a handshake, someone reaching for a door, a laugh) and capture it with a single press — no burst. Get one keeper from one press. Do this five times with five different moments. The constraint forces you to see the rhythm rather than spray. Note how it changes your attention.

Exercise 10.10 ⭐⭐ — Burst the unrepeatable. Find a fast, unpredictable peak (a kid on a swing at the top of the arc, a bird taking off, a thrown ball caught, a jump). Anticipate it, aim and lock first, then fire a short burst — half a second, not five — around the moment. Edit down to the one frame. Then delete the rest immediately. Note: did the peak land in a frame, or in a gap between two?

Exercise 10.11 ⭐⭐ — Write the settings. For each scenario, write the drive mode (single / short burst), a starting shutter speed, the focus approach (prefocus / continuous AF / tap-lock), and the instant you'd catch: (a) a friend blowing out birthday candles; (b) a street musician at the loud beat; (c) a cyclist passing a graffiti wall; (d) coins passing in a market transaction; (e) a child jumping into a puddle. Explain one trade-off in each.

Exercise 10.12 ⭐⭐⭐ — The phone-lag fight. On a phone, deliberately diagnose and defeat shutter lag. First, shoot a moving subject with everything on auto (including HDR) and note how late/smeared the result is. Then turn HDR off, press-and-hold to lock AE/AF on the spot in advance, and try again. Document the difference in a side-by-side. Write what changed and why (you may reference Chapter 23's preview on why HDR adds lag).

Part D — Five Conditions (one moment, many tries)

Exercise 10.13 ⭐⭐ — One action, five timings. Pick a single repeatable action (a friend tossing keys and catching them works perfectly) and shoot it five times, deliberately catching five different instants: the wind-up, the release, the apex, the catch, the aftermath. Lay all five side by side. Self-select the one that is the decisive moment and write why it beats the other four. This teaches that the moment is a choice within the action.

Exercise 10.14 ⭐⭐⭐ — One corner, five characters. Set up on one stage (Exercise 10.6's spot is fine) and wait until five different kinds of subject have walked into it — a hurried adult, a child, an elderly person, someone carrying something, a pair in conversation. Make the best frame of each. Then choose the strongest overall and explain how the subject changed what the same stage's light and geometry "said." The stage was constant; the human content was the variable.

Part E — Fix the Photo (diagnose and prescribe the re-shoot)

Exercise 10.15 ⭐⭐ — The late frame. A described failed shot: "I tried to photograph my niece jumping off the diving board. In my picture she has already hit the water — there's just a splash and no body. I pressed exactly when she jumped." Diagnose the failure precisely (what mechanism made it late?) and prescribe the exact re-shoot — drive mode, when to start, focus approach.

Exercise 10.16 ⭐⭐ — The impaled head. A described failed shot: "I caught my friend at the perfect moment of his laugh — eyes crinkled, mouth open — but a lamppost in the background appears to be growing straight out of the top of his head, and a bright red car is glowing in the corner." The moment is right but the frame failed. Diagnose which half of Cartier-Bresson's definition broke, and prescribe two fixes (one about position, one about timing).

Exercise 10.17 ⭐⭐⭐ — The spray that missed. A described failed shot: "I held down burst for five seconds as the bird took off and got 60 frames. In every single one the bird is either still sitting or already a distant dot — I never got the wings-out launch. I have 60 useless frames to delete." Diagnose what went wrong despite the long burst (two distinct errors), and prescribe the corrected approach.

Part F — Eye Training (the Light Log, no camera)

Exercise 10.18 ⭐ — Log a stage. Add a Light Log entry: name one place on your daily route where good light reliably falls at a certain hour, and what kind of human moment regularly passes through it (the bus stop the low sun rakes at 8 a.m.; the doorway people duck through when it rains). You have just recorded a decisive-moment stage you can return to with a camera.

Exercise 10.19 ⭐⭐ — The unrepeatable inventory. For one full day, without a camera, simply notice and note every fleeting moment you would have photographed if you'd had the camera up and ready — a gesture, a glance, a peak of action, a quiet in-between. Aim for ten. The point is to discover how many moments flow past unphotographed, and to start seeing them forming before they peak. Tomorrow, carry the camera.

Exercise 10.20 ⭐⭐⭐ — Predict and verify. Pick one repeating real-world event you can observe (a train arriving, a crossing signal cycling, a fountain pulsing, a dog walker's route). Predict, in writing and in advance, the exact instant the "picture" would happen and what would be in the frame. Then watch and verify. Refine your prediction over three repetitions. You are training the predictive half of anticipation with no shutter pressure at all.

Exercise 10.21 ⭐⭐ — Recreate the leap. Recreate the spirit of Figure 10.1: find a spot where a person crossing would complete a composition — a puddle with a reflection, a poster or mural a passing figure would rhyme with, a stripe of light a silhouette would fill. Hold the frame, prefocus, and wait for the right figure to leap, stride, or step into it. You are after the coincidence of a human moment and a geometric rhyme. Keep your best and describe the rhyme you caught.

Exercise 10.22 ⭐⭐⭐ — The quiet exchange (recreate Figure 10.5). Recreate the spirit of "Change" (Figure 10.5): photograph a small, ordinary exchange between two people — coins, a handshake, a passed object, a shared phone — and catch the instant the thing is suspended between them, not yet given or taken. Prefocus on the gap, frame tight, expose for the subjects. The lesson is that the decisive moment can be tiny and undramatic. Observe consent (a friend, with permission, is ideal).

Part H — Interleaved (mixing prior chapters)

Exercise 10.23 ⭐⭐ — Moment + golden hour (Ch. 5 + 10). Combine Chapter 5's light with this chapter's timing: go to a street stage at golden hour, find warm raking or back light, lock a daylight white balance (so the gold survives), and wait for a human moment to enter the warm light. Keep one frame where the light and the moment are both right. Note which was harder to get.

Exercise 10.24 ⭐⭐ — Moment + vantage (Ch. 9 + 10). Combine Chapter 9's perspective with timing: photograph a moment from a deliberately low (worm's-eye) or high (bird's-eye) vantage rather than eye level — a kid's jump from down at their level, a market exchange from above. Show how the vantage changes what the moment says. Keep the frame and one sentence comparing it to the same moment shot at eye level.

Exercise 10.25 ⭐⭐⭐ — The full Part II frame (Ch. 6–10). Make one photograph that consciously uses all five Part II skills at once: a deliberate composition (thirds/lines, Ch. 6), an intentional use of color or black-and-white tone (Ch. 7/8), a chosen vantage (Ch. 9), in chosen light (Ch. 5), at a caught decisive moment (Ch. 10). This is the capstone of the part. Write a short paragraph naming how each of the five decisions shows up in your frame.

Stretch challenge

Exercise 10.26 ⭐⭐⭐ — The one-week moment hunt. For seven days, keep your camera (or phone) within reach and ready, and each day catch one decisive moment from everyday life that you anticipated — a gesture, a glance, a peak, a quiet in-between. At week's end, lay the seven out together. Choose the strongest for your Portfolio Checkpoint, and rank the rest. You will see, across seven days, your timing sharpen — and you'll likely find that the best frames came not from hunting strangers but from the ordinary life around you.

Model answers and critiques for the starred and odd-numbered exercises appear in the book's "Answers to Selected Exercises." Try each with a camera before reading them — in decisive-moment photography especially, the attempt (and the near-miss) is the lesson.