A bit strange

I really don't know why I like this photo so much. It is not a good photo by any standard. The composition isn't very bad, but not very good either. The light isn't very interesting. The moment isn't decisive whatsoever. If it were, the woman in the middle should at least look over her shoulder to the guy with the striped tie, and the guy on the left should push up his glasses with his finger, while at the same time the woman on the right would pick up her papers that lie spread over the floor.

On the plus side, there is a famous person in this picture. It's the stripe-tied man in the middle. He is the former Dutch Prime Minister Balkenende, whom I wrote about a few weeks ago. He came to a meeting of his party last saturday to say goodbye to his former voters. On the picture he is talking to one of them, a woman, invisible behind the door.

There is a rule in photojournalism that when you take a photo of Mrs A talking to Mr B, you have to have at least some reference to both persons in the image. One of them may be a shadow, a shape or you may see only a hand, but it has to be absolutely clear that there is a conversation between two people. In this picture, you see Mr Balkenende listening to nothing. You can't even be sure he is listening, he may also be daydreaming, phantasizing or just being temporarily disconnected from reality.

When I pointed my camera at the scene I was standing more to the right, and had both Mr Balkenende and the woman who had addressed him, perfectly in the middle of my frame. If I had pressed the button, I would have had a reasonably OK photo, of an unimportant scene, so a meaningless photo that would have disappeared into the dungeons of one of my hard disks.

I did not press the button. Instead, I moved to the left, and then pressed the button. I still think it was a brilliant move. But I have no idea why.

You may find all this a bit strange. So do I....