the repeated decisive moment

"it's all a fraud...."

To quote Ted Grant: "Any idiot photographer worth his salt can have someone do an action many times and eventually capture something decisive looking."

Sometime in early 2004 a "decisive moment" got in my head.  -- I could picture it. Since I'm not talented enough or patient enough to go find this moment, it became simply a matter of making it happen, of faking it. It took a few hours and 150 attempts, about 100 of which are included here. I hope people find the evolution of this photograph it interesting, or even useful.

I'm not going to flatter myself by saying that this is an exceptional image worthy of study by critics, students, and pundits; it's something that occupied me for an afternoon and produced a reasonably interesting result which I was satisfied with and by way of a process more unique to the digital age than to it's predecessors which might prove tangentially interesting to some.