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Photography can take us places, we’ve never been before, perhaps never dreamed of. There are some photographs that will make you stop and think. These 10 photographs stopped the world and people hold their breaths for a few seconds to take it all in.
The Photograph That Raised the Photojournalistic Stakes:
 “Omaha Beach, Normandy, France” Robert Capa, 1944
“If your pictures aren’t good enough,” war photographer Robert Capa used to say, “you aren’t close enough.” Words to die by, yes, but the man knew of what he spoke. After all, his most memorable shots were taken on the morning of D-Day, June 6, 1944, when he landed alongside the first waves of infantry at Omaha Beach.
Caught under heavy fire, Capa dove for what little cover he could find, then shot all the film in his camera, and got out – just barely. He escaped with his life, but not much else. Of the four rolls of film Capa took of the horrific D-Day battle, all but 11 exposures were ruined by an overeager lab assistant, who melted the film in his rush to develop it. (He was trying to meet the deadline for the next issue of Life magazine.)
In an ironic twist, however, that same mistake gave the few surviving exposures their famously surreal look (”slightly out of focus,” Life incorrectly explained upon printing them). More than 50 years later, director Steven Spielberg would go to great lengths to reproduce the look of that “error” for his harrowing D-Day landing sequence in “Saving Private Ryan,” even stripping the coating from his camera lenses to echo Capa’s notorious shots.
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One of the growing areas in photography is taking photographs that are so brilliant that the viewer will initially conclude that they must have been significantly altered or manipulated in Photoshop. There are entire blogs devoted to showcasing these images, and the photographers who take them. A combination of perfect composition, lighting, color and timing are required to capture these brilliant photographs at the perfect moment.