About cameras and taking photos
I’ve recently seen it show up in my referrer logs, and it turns out a bunch of people I don’t know have “pinned” a bunch of photos from my blog. I feel like this site came out of nowhere.
You can imagine my surprise when I discovered my sister-in-law browsing Pinterest over the holidays with her new Android-based Toshiba Thrive tablet! When did everyone get so high-tech?
It’s not just a great band name. It’s also an incredible photo.
A few weeks ago I discovered a tweet from someone who was planning on using a photo of mine as the inspiration for a new tattoo. I was floored—what an honor. I reached out to the woman and asked if she wouldn’t mind sending me a photo of the finished work so I could post it to my blog. The appointment got delayed several times, and I forgot about the whole thing, that is until yesterday, when I got an email with a twitpic of the tattoo (inked by Ellen at Chameleon Tattoo & Body Piercing).
Towards the end of last year, in the middle of our travels, I faced a challenge: do I begin working on a photo book for 2010, or do I delay the project until the end of 2011 and produce two volumes at once? Or, do I just drop the idea of doing annual photo books altogether and make a single book specific to our travels?
The alternatives only seemed to put off the inevitable, and I knew that the longer I waited, the harder it would be to remember the details. As satisfying as creating an “Our Big Adventure” book sounded (I admit I haven’t entirely ruled out the idea), over the course of our lives the trip will be just one of many things we’ve done. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of continuing the photo books as an annual tradition, splitting the adventure over two years—continuity be damned! So I decided to plow ahead, even as Bali swirled around me.
I’d read somewhere about the phenomenon where some tourists (usually from Korea and Japan) will request other tourists (usually Caucasian?) to pose in photos with them. And indeed, the first time it happened, at Lake Bratan in Bali, I thought she wanted me to take a photo of her. Oh no. She wanted me to take a photo with her. Ok, no problem. Strange, but whatever.
I don’t recall if it’s happened much since then. Maybe once or twice. Infrequently enough not to register. Then we got to India.
For one thing, we are WAY outnumbered here. Even in our visits to the most tourist-visited destinations, like Varanasi and Agra, the Indian tourists absolutely dwarf the foreigners. Which means no matter how conservatively we dress or act, we always stand out. I suppose for that reason, people LOVE taking pictures of us.
The funny thing is, we love having our pictures taken! We play along, we wave, we smile, we give people the thumbs up. We pose with children, we pose with friends, we pose shaking hands. Things really started to take off in Mount Abu, as most of the Indians there were on holiday with their families (thus already snapping photos), and we just happened to be one more unusual sight along the way. Apparently I bare a resemblance to “that Incredible India guy”, or so I’ve been told.
Finally it occurred to me that I needed to get a photo of them taking a photo of me—so people would believe me! Voila:
