My (planned) modus operandi for confrontations.

Another method to consider, though intended entirely for a laugh, would be to carry a packet of fake blood in your cheek and if someone confronts you, bite down on it and spit blood all over your chin while screaming and flailing your arms wildly.

That should cause the confrontation to end pretty fast. :D
 
Jack Conrad said:
Another method to consider, though intended entirely for a laugh, would be to carry a packet of fake blood in your cheek and if someone confronts you, bite down on it and spit blood all over your chin while screaming and flailing your arms wildly.

That should cause the confrontation to end pretty fast. :D
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LOL!! :D

"Please lengthen your message to at least 10 characters."
 
Just use your common sense.

But I think most big street photographers would disagree that "one's photography" is less important than people," (which I take to mean "people's feelings.")
 
Boris Stupak said:
I was once on an assignment to photograph a foreign politician in a foreign country. I was shooting for a Japanese magazine in a Pacific country.

The politician was shot, murdered by the military on the tarmac of the airport, and I captured the whole thing on film. (nobody had imagined that this was going to happen) I was about 10 feet away.

A young soldier saw me photographing, and pointed his rifle at me and was going to shoot me. I shook my head "no", opened the camera, pulled out the film, exposed it all to light, and threw it on the ground. Then I also dropped the camera on the ground and raised my hands, palms outward.

A military officer saw me do that. He looked at me a long time (it seemed a long time), looked at the young soldier aiming at me, looked at me again. Finally, he gestured to the soldier to lower his rifle, and said to me "go".

I went. I forced myself to walk slowly and quickly disappeared into the crowd. I trembled uncontrollably after I was out of danger.
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Manila, Aquino assassination, 1983
 
starless said:
Just use your common sense.

But I think most big street photographers would disagree that "one's photography" is less important than people," (which I take to mean "people's feelings.")
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It's complicated. I don't feel like one completely takes precedent over the other and a balance needs to be struck in order to to have a good experience. The good news is these things aren't impossible to figure out, either intuitively or by trial and error. Over the next few weekends there will be a lot of the latter. It would be silly to be inflexible having barely started. I've only been out for one weekend and I've already learned a lot.

I will admit though, there are types of photographer I do not want to be.
 
Major Tom said:
It's complicated. I don't feel like one completely takes precedent over the other and a balance needs to be struck . . .
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Certainly. And, I'd say, the vast majority of the confrontations I've had in the last 40 years or so have fallen into one of two categories. Either they have been resolved more or less amicably, or (in a very, very few cases) they have involved people who were substantially unbalanced and would not have been open to any rational argument.

Cheers,

R.
 
I once was photographing a detail on some ten story apartment building. Some guy looking out of his window saw me with my camera across the street. He hung out of his window shouting all kinds of expletives at me. Then asked why I was photographing his building. I told him that I was going to buy it and throw his sorry ass out on the street. He disappeared inside and I got away as quickly as I could. I figured it would take him a few minutes to get downstairs and by then I'd be gone.

Living in NYC, believe it or not, its been my only angry confrontation.
 
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