to take a photo
Because you have just bought your new camera baby and you want to show it off to the world, you will first take photos of everyone you see. The photos that are first-born will mostly be of faces, looking forward, highly aware. This is only natural. Keep doing this until people associate you with that annoying sensation of always being captured. Don’t worry if people get annoyed by you, this just means you’re doing it right, and it’s only to preface the next, more important step.
The natural reaction to being annoyed by something is to first question it. This won’t make a difference on you. You have your camera and therefore a mission. So keep at it. The second reaction of others to this will be to tune you out. This is where the fun starts. The best photos to me, are when the landscape doesn’t recognize you’ve entered it. People will carry on without you, and you turn passive. In fact, you hide your face behind the body so much that you turn completely invisible.
Then, you take your best photos. Or at least, this is when I take my favourites.
The invisibility they grant you will bleed out into the photos you capture when no one else is around. Savour the ability to take your time in any situation you step in. Frame what you notice first, and leave before anything changes on you.
Don’t worry about being invisible for too long, or forgotten. The fact that you’ve captured so many people in so many ways, unposed and unaware, is reason enough for them to find you again. Share these shots. They are meant to be a far cry from your carefully posed camera-ready firstborns. People will find them (“I don’t remember when this was taken!”), and if you did it right, some can’t help but like them.
And if they ever did forget you, they will remember again. Even if for nothing else, the effort it took on your end to choose to remember them this way.
