"IN MY WAY!"

From my point of view, she really couldn’t have picked a worse spot.

It was, after all, in many ways absolutely the most perfect spot. The weather was lovely, the view was gorgeous, and there weren’t too many people about so it was peaceful enough. In the distance you could hear the occasional bark of an over-excited dog, or the screaming of another disappointed child, but that did little to mask the gentle lapping of the water at the edge of the lake, the rustling of the leaves in the trees and the chirruping of the birds in spring as they set about the vital tasks of finding a mate, settling down and doing a little nest-building.

It was just the place, in fact, to go for a stroll, sit down and get that reading that had to be done over with, without the petty distractions of the household as it clattered about and dealt with yet another morning after the night before.

So, indeed, from her point of view it was the perfect place to sit and read on that Sunday morning, with that spectacular view overlooking the lake, but…

She was IN MY WAY!!!

The camera was poised in my hand, I’d walked around the entire perimeter of that lake, anticipating the perfect viewpoint as I approached the end of it and then, as I came around that final curve, sitting in a field right on the end of it, almost exactly where I wanted to view the lake from, there she was, sitting there totally oblivious about the fact that she had become an obstacle, reading her books as if she’d settled down for the entire day, and sticking out like a sore thumb to cause a distraction in some potential image, preventing it from having the effect of the gentle emptiness of the barren wilderness which I am always eager to achieve.

I can get very impatient with those whom I feel are “in my way” when I’m taking my pictures, especially in anywhere that’s considered to be something of a “tourist trap”. It’s not, I don’t think, that I really expect to get those visions of emptiness that the professionals do. After all, they usually get access to these places during those “golden hours” when the place hasn’t yet opened, or has closed for the day. But It’s simply that I prefer not to clutter up my images with hundreds of people who I don’t really know, and the less of them there are, standing in front of the thing I’m trying to get a half-decent picture of, the better.

After all, sometimes you just want to look at the thing you went all of that way to see and be able to remember it clearly, rather than constantly having to think about that strange bloke, who you never even noticed at the time, who was wearing the funny hat and offensive t-shirt combination, and who was busily picking his nose as you clicked the shutter.

But sometimes… Oh, I don’t know... They are just “In My Way!”

I often waste quite a lot of my time fretting about this. I remember spending quite a considerable chunk of the precious few hours we once spent at Abu Simbel just waiting for enough of the crowds to clear so that I could get a reasonable (Not prize-winning, just reasonable. It really is all that I want…) photograph of the outside of one of the temples, and every time it almost got as clear as it ever would, another crowd would stroll into my field of view and the waiting game would start up all over again. Sometimes that crowd would end up staring at me, wondering about this irritated looking foreigner who was standing there, holding up his camera, and looking rather impatient and bothered at the presence of all these bloody people.

To this very day I swear that the chap who came out of the temple and then sat down for twenty minutes on one of the blocks outside which were right in front of it, did so just to utterly ruin my chance of a clear shot, and so another waiting game of “cat and mouse” began which I eventually lost as the sun began to set.

And as for that group of young German people overlooking Bixby Bridge in California… Just how many “wacky antics” are possible on the edge of a precipice? And how long could it take to make a suitable record of them? Forever it seemed that day... I wouldn’t have minded, but after all of my waiting, the shot I took turned out to be pretty lousy anyway…

They got me flustered you see, and I never spotted the lens flare...

I am getting better though, if not exactly more tolerant. Nowadays I am learning to take the best shot I can even if it’s not “perfect” because it really might be as good as it gets, and there is always the opportunity for judicious cropping to be done later on if necessary. If, by waiting, I get a “better” shot, then that’s all well and good, but there is at least something passable already “in the can” as it were, and, as with many things, I usually find that my first bash at it is by far the best one anyway.

People seem so oblivious, too, to the presence of someone else just trying to take a photo. Either that or they simply don’t seem to care. Certainly not about anything other than their own photographs anyway, if that is what they are doing, but sometimes even just being somewhere seems to make people unaware that other people maybe only have that one chance in their life too to be in a particular place. I sometimes wonder whether their own snapshots, it seems to me, must be awash with peripheral strangers which really mustn’t bother them half as much as it does me.

Occasionally someone will stop and let you take the shot instead of walking in front of you at the critical moment, but those people are becoming, it would appear, increasingly rare in our intolerant and generally over-photographed world where every little device that people own seems to be a camera of some sort.

Still, I like to think that I’m not an absolutist when it comes to these things. On the contrary, sometimes I quite like there to be as many people as possible in my way. Sometimes a picture of a crowd is exactly what you want and as long as none of them actually notice the camera, those can be the most interesting pictures of all, even if I am starting to think that most of the photographic record of the early 21st century is going to be pictures of other people taking pictures, such is the proliferation of photography nowadays.

Sometimes, though, I will admit that it is rather nice to have people in your shots. When taking pictures of some of the more impressive structures of the world, those very same strangers who are in your way can go a long way towards giving you a good sense of scale, as long as they then get out of the way afterwards...

Still, when it comes to the small matter of the girl at the lakeside, to be fair, she did pack up and go on her way about ten minutes later, and so I did get some “clean” shots of the lake then, and I don’t think she moved on simply because of an impatient-looking bloke lurking around on the periphery of the field and making exasperated sighing and tutting noises which drifted across the dell and spoke of loss and despair. Although there is a slight possibility that that kind of thing might very well have broken the spell of the general ambience and caused her to move on, I genuinely believe that she never even noticed that we were there.

The irony is, of course, that when I look at that picture now, it turns out to be one of the nicer ones I took that day. Her presence adds a bit of mood to it, and at least it has a story to tell, so, in the end I suppose that I will have to admit that it was no bad thing that she got “In My Way!”