Photography and Playstation 3: Is Playing Games Useful for Photogs?
If you are a photographer you are probably familiar with Henri Cartier-Bresson and his photography. If you are interested in street photography it is probably safe to say you studied his work, bought his books, watched his movies etc. And you probably also know how he trained his eye for being able to capture the decisive moment, right? For those of you who don’t know: after finishing his soldier training Henri was living on the coast of Africa making a living as a hunter. As a hunter he had to be patient, know where to stand so he wouldn’t be visible for the animal he was hunting and he had to know exactly when to push the trigger. After fighting malaria, almost dying and going back to Europe he put his rifle away and picked up his iconic Leica camera with 50mm lens and began to hunt for perfect moments shooting people in the streets of Marseille, Paris, Berlin, Prague, … making some of the best street photographs ever taken.
Nowadays hunting is not very common at least in the city where I live, but there are very realistic video games. And by playing first person shooting games we can be training our “eye and trigger finger” reflex like HCB did in Africa and while he had his army training. That sounds cool, I told myself and I decided to give it a try.
I was working a lot lately and needed a break anyways so I dusted off my Playstation 3 put in Call of Duty and started to play. I use the same finger for taking pictures as I do for pushing the trigger in a game and when I was out shooting today my respond time between making a decision to take a photo and actually focusing and pushing the trigger seemed a bit faster to me. Maybe I am making myself believe that and am only justifying the time I spend playing the game or maybe there is some merit to what I am saying.
What do you think?
