Thought on Leslie's pic.
I really couldn't tell what was going on there except that someone's hand was being held by someone who, assuming from his dress, was providing a service, possibly medical.
The point of this type of work is, to me, to present the decisive moment. There's no problem with all the preferatory shots, except that they're not the ones to show. The photo editor's job is to locate and present the moment, but the shooter's job is to capture it so it's there for the editor to find. You are, right now, both shooter and editor, so I see it as your job to present as decisive a moment as you were able to capture. This image doens't feel to me like a decisive moment.
Certainly fill flash was desperately needed, just to make the hand discernable. But a bunch of cropping might have moved this particular pre-moment closer to being decisive.
It's in the nature of pj, to me, that one grabs as much as possible, hoping simultaneously to get a decisive moment, and to be able to keep track of what's going on all over the scene to locate the moment in time to shoot it. That's one reason why pjs ran so quickly to digital, because they didn't have to count costs for film, lug film around, wait for the results or process it themselves after fearing that they've missed the shot, worry about their cropping, worry that they picked the wrong crop and left something out etc. etc. It's a very alert and adrenalated type of shooting. The zone is very wide, you can't concentrate on what's in the viewfinder, you gotta shoot with both eyes open, and concentrate like hell.
One of them damn skillful Turnleys just published an essay in Harper's this month. Check out the decisive moments there.
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Emily L. Ferguson
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508-563-6822
New England landscapes, wooden boats and races, press photography http://www.vsu.cape.com/~elf/
