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Capturing the perfect moment

In the fish market in Muttrah Bay, Muscat. Picture: Stephen Scourfield

I stand in the fish market in Muttrah Bay, in the old part of Muscat, Oman, for a long time. It is boiling hot inside this concrete-floored, cream- tiled, hosed-down building on the fragrant coast of the Middle East.

I have a small camera bag over my shoulder (it's a nice, unobvious one that I use all the time), and inside the main compartment is a Canon 5D MkIII with a 24mm to 105mm Canon lens on it. Packed beneath it, a light 75mm to 300mm lens.

But I don't take the camera out. I just stand in the corner, back to a wall, and watch.

There are marlin and shark, anchovies and pitiful little crabs. Fish are bought and sold, and with each transaction, men take off their embroidered kuma hats, tuck rial notes inside, then slip them back on. I just stand and let it all play out, until I get the rhythm of the place, and they get used to me being part of the scene.

Even then I don't take the big camera out but unzip the bag's front pocket and take out a little Canon G1X - a hand-sized camera with a tilting "vario" screen but which still gives high-quality images, still shooting RAW format.

And then I stand holding the camera until I feel that everyone there knows I have it and what I am about to do. Some men look at me, and I hold the camera out slightly, and they nod. The "contract" between photographer and subject is formed, and I start making pictures.

And now every technique I know and have used for nearly 30 years kicks in. Just how low can I go with the ISO? Do I want people sharp (say, 1/250th of a second, which means a higher ISO)? Do I want them blurred to show movement (perhaps 1/30th of a second, which might cope with 200 ISO)? Or am I really going to back myself, shoot at 1/15th of a second and pan with them as they walk past, a marlin under one arm, so that man and fish are sharp and the background blurred?

It is this mix of creativity and vision matched with rock-solid camera knowledge and technique that makes some of the best travel photographs.

And it often happens so fast. The moments that cannot be created or repeated can be the most precious.

And here I am, in the fish market in Muscat, carefully framing pictures of men in groups discussing the quality of the fish, and squabbling over the price.

Now that everyone's happy and relaxed, I take out the big digital single-lens reflex camera and start panning with people passing - following them with the lens, taking pictures as they move. I take the shutter speed right down; I back myself.

I am reminded of the jazz trumpeter Charlie Bird Parker, who once said that when he was "in the zone" playing, he was so intensely focused that a second seemed to stretch out to a long time and he could play around with notes within that second. It's a bit like that when my finger's on the shutter button of a camera. I am totally absorbed by expressions, fleetingly exchanged glances, catching flowing white dishdasha robes just as they go out of frame, light suddenly coming in a window.

Good pictures require total concentration; I am totally in the moment, absorbing and absorbed by the scene.

And through this scene threads one of the most important phrases in my life - point of view. It applies to everything I have described here. For first it is a filmic and photographic term - the actual point of viewing of the camera. Its physical position and angle. (You see POV all through film scripts. POV: You look at me. POV: I look at you.) In just the same way, it describes the point of view of a "stills camera" - the precise position and angle at which a camera is placed to make a picture.

But, at the other end of the scale, our point of view is intellectual, emotional and philosophical. It is our sensitivity to another culture, and the strangers around us. And it is, perhaps, what travel forms and informs most and best.

It is something that travelling and photography have helped me to develop in all these years. "Well, if you want my point of view . . . "

But while I have changed, photography hasn't much. Surprised to read that? After all, it has moved from film to digital. Yes, but the three technical pillars upon which photography is built are unchanged. Every nice little preset in even a simple camera's menu (night, food, running-man) are a mix of shutter speed, aperture and ISO settings. There are basically no extra tricks - just these fundamentals.

Setting ISO (the old ASA) fixes the camera sensor's sensitivity, just as film was chosen for the same thing - 100 for nice, sharp pictures, 1600 when it was an inside party and we wanted to go wild.

Photographers take control of shutter speed because we either want the waterfall milky (perhaps slower than 1/8th of a second, on a tripod, so a lot of water passes the lens) or we want every drop pin sharp (probably more than 1/1000th of a second, so the water drops don't have time to pass the lens).

We take control of aperture because we want to control depth of field - the distance in focus before and after the subject we are photographing. Those are the "F" numbers, and think of them as distances - f2.8 is a smaller amount in focus before and after the subject than f32. At f2.8 we might isolate a flower and have the background blurry.

At f32 we might have the person we are photographing and the mountain range behind all in focus.

One decent photographic rule of thumb is that "the lower the number the higher the quality". The fewer pictures you can store on your memory card, the bigger the files are. The lower the ISO, the finer and less "grainy" the image. Trying to keep numbers low is almost invariably good.

My camera's on the P program setting, and I'm using exposure lock (the star button) all day long, interpreting the light, manipulating each exposure. Working fast and accurately is important for travel photography.

So, too, is importing photographs into the laptop each day, captioning and editing them into "best" and "very best" folders, and looking for the gaps in sets. For portfolios need texture - look long, look short, look up and look down. Get details as well as landscapes, formal portraits as well as snaps.

Photographing people is perhaps the biggest test. You need all the technical stuff running subconsciously, so that your mind is free to deal with the humanity, and do it with humility.

On a cattle station in outback Australia, I had set my tripod low, with the camera on it, and was bending down, away from the three station hands I was going to photograph, considering a different lens. When I turned back, they had composed themselves in front of the camera. One stood, hat tilted, one western boot hooked up on the other, arms crossed. He looked like Clint Eastwood. "How do you want me to stand?" he asked.

"Just the way you are," I replied.

His real question was: "How are you going to present me to the world?" My answer meant "with honesty". That's what I want in an image - honesty.

In portrait photography, subjects have to participate. They show me what they really are; I show them my ethics. I reveal as much of myself to them as they do to me.

I like to get a big story into a picture, and I love to see and set people in their environment. As I write in the book Beautiful Witness: "Landscape and people. For me it is the crucial interplay. We affect and mould the landscape; the landscape affects and moulds us."

Out in the landscape of Australia, I did a little book once with National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry, who famously didn't know who the "Afghan girl" was that made him famous, and took part in a documentary, trying to track her down. (Not my way of doing things at all.) I have spent a little time with Annie Leibovitz and heard her fears about losing, amid all the highly styled and lit magazine work she does (Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk; pregnant Demi Moore; Clint Eastwood bound with rope in the desert), the simple vision she had as a youngster starting out with a simple camera for Rolling Stone magazine, simply shooting pictures.

Simplicity is important. Just being in that moment; being fully engaged with a place and its people; making pictures.

Arabist and writer Sir Wilfred Thesiger took the most wonderful black-and-white photographs when he lived with tribal people in Africa, Iran and Arabia.

But I particularly like what he wrote about cameras: "I bought a Leica II before going to the Sudan in 1934 and I used this camera until 1959, when I returned from Ethiopia. In Arabia I kept my camera in a goat-skin bag to protect it from the sand and have done so ever since."

It reminds me that what is important is what we see and that we really see it. Recording that moment as a photograph is the product of that; the result of that vision, that point of view.

At the end of my time in Oman, I return to the fish market in Muttrah Bay, and just stand, back to the tiled wall, in the heat. And I wonder if, from the pile of dead others, one fish might jump. And I wonder if, this time, I might have my camera ready for it.

'The camera gives you a licence to go

out alone into the world with a purpose.' ANNIE LEIBOVITZ, PHOTOGRAPHER