Elfed in the High Street

I've recently subscribed to the journals of two blippers who take extraordinary street portraits, Matt Austin Photography in the UK and Hurly Burly in the USA. I'd love to do that but it requires a certain chutzpah that I feel I lack. But if not now, when?

Today I stopped to study a small homemade poster in a shop window: a reproduced photo of a little girl aged about 2 or 3 with the words 'Happy Birthday Mum. This High Street lollipop lady is 50 today.' (For those who may not know, lollipop ladies, or men, are employed to help children to cross the roads on the way to and from school by holding up a pole bearing a round STOP sign.)
As I looked a voice behind me said "It's a good photograph isn't it?" I turned around and, quick as a flash, said "You'd make a good photograph too - may I?" He assented and here he is: Elfed in the High Street. I'd never met him before.

The great Henri Cartier-Bresson said "In photography, creation is a quick business -- an instant, a gush, a response -- putting the camera up to the eye's line of fire, snatching with that economical little box whatever it was that surprised you, catching it in midair, without tricks, without letting it get away. You make a painting at the same time that you take a photo. That moment, that fraction of a second, is valuable for the freshness of its impression...

This for me is the reason I remain so faithful to the little 'point and shoot' camera.