This is a series of weekly short tips on photography that I’ll be posting every Tuesday.  Many of these are aimed at folks who have just picked up their first camera, but not all, so check back every week for new tips!

The above photo is, to date, the most-viewed photo on my Flickr stream.

It’s not shot with a super-awesome $Texas lens.  It’s not a fantastic composition.  Truth be told, it’s not my favourite photo.  But, that said, it does illustrate the title of this blog post pretty well.  Viewing it at high resolution, you can see just how focused everyone is on that puck.  Will Huet catch the rebound?  Will Straka or one of his fellow New York Rangers swoop in and put it in the net, or will the Habs defense keep them at bay?  There’s a lot of tension in this image; both figuratively and literally, everything is up in the air here, and the closure we want will never offered to us through anything but our imagination (or, perhaps, a highlight reel).

At the risk of sounding self-congratulatory, the reason I believe this photo is so popular is because of the moment that it captured.  A fraction of a second earlier or a fraction of a second later, and this would have been just another snapshot taken by a newbie with a camera.  Instead, through dumb luck, this newbie managed to catch a half-decent photo of an exciting game.

What I’ve learned since is that catching the moment has a lot more to do with patience than luck.  It’s about avoiding the “spray-and-pray” still of shooting, and becoming analytical of how the scene will unfold before your lens.  It’s about patience.  It’s about gut instinct, or about knowing your subject, and, okay, sometimes it’s still dumb luck.  But the more you learn to anticipate the right moment to squeeze the trigger, the better you’ll get at creating dynamic images.