KCmike wrote in post #17863332
IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/CH9L7r Flying South by
Mike Day, on Flickr
This was actually a neighborhood street lined with trees and snow on the ground photo I was setting up to capture when a flock of birds came through and I decided to switch and fire off a few at them. The sun is setting in lower right corner and I like how the trees frame the shot giving the bird's direction a little more purpose. Hope this translates to you all as well.
I've got the sunset on the street lined up for posting later this week as well as a few other ones I'm proud of from this past weekend.
Funny thing happened while on the street. At the end of the road a man is walking into the frame pretty far down the path. I guess he was putting both his hands up to his face covering himself because he didn't want to be photographed. By the time he got to my car he gave me an ear full. I told him I wasn't trying to capture him and the sun was to blinding to even know he was in the shot. Oh well. I was a little upset at first especially when he told me he was a photographer as well but I let him vent and then I went away. Has anyone ever had someone complain about a capture you had while out shooting?
Mike D
Yikes. Who knows; maybe the guy was just having a bad day. Or maybe he's an agressive jerk with anger issues. Either way, he's in the wrong. I've never had a physical confrontation with an agressive bystander/subject, but I think about it a lot. My dream is to be a documentary/street photographer someday, but I realize that street photographers are increasingly confronted by an angry public who are not only legally without cause but also sadly naive. I've always thought it curious that most people see nothing sinister about a person pulling out an iPhone and taking a snapshot with 10 strangers in the field of view, but go rabid when they see someone with a DSLR try to take the same shot.
I recently bought a Fuji X100T for this very reason, and even that camera is sometimes too obtrusive for some situations. I predict that smart phones will become the primary camera for street photographers, with the exception of a few hardy souls. We live in interesting times.
Sorry for the rant, but this is a subject that I feel strongly about.
And to answer your question, I've had two encounters in seven years of serious shooting. One was at the Riverside farmer's market. I was there with a KCAI class and I started to take a shot of a man holding a small girl. The guy said "I could ask you to not take the photo", whereupon my instructor kindly said, "No, you actually can't - this is a public place". The guy didn't press the point and I took the shot. The second encounter was in Paris this Spring. I was in the Metro (subway) taking a shot across the tracks when I noticed an obviously drunk middle-aged guy waving wildly and "putting up his dukes", as if to say, "Take my picture and I'll fight you!". Well, the tracks were between us, so I figured I was safe. Afterward, I found out that French privacy laws are a bit more strict than ours, but again, it was in a public place in the most photographed city on the planet. Privacy is an illusion in most cases.
