Watch The Birdie

Even though I don't take a lot of pictures myself, I usually enjoy looking at other people's photos. (Note that I said usually. Photo albums are a window into what people find important enough to capture for eternity and sometimes that window should have remained closed.) And while I really love some of the high-resolution pictures of natural phenomenons, considering the people I know more often the pictures are intended to make the person looking at them laugh. That is why my favorite kind of Tweets are the ones people send out with a picture and a funny caption. Now, you would think this would lead to me taking a lot of pictures on my own, but it very rarely happens. The main reason for this is quite simple - I never think to take pictures in the moment. I guess this comes from not being a Facebooker who feels the need to photograph everything, but it always seems to take me a few seconds to realize this is something I should be sharing with other people and by the time I take my phone out, hit the correct button to open the phone function (it is one of two buttons on the side and for some reason I never guess the hit the right one the first time) and gotten the settings to their correct levels the moment has passed. This sounds frustrating, but the thing is today I was reminded that even when I could take the time to set up the picture as perfectly as I could hope for I still wouldn't be in a hurry to start snapping away.

This afternoon I was walking into a store where the parking lot was very crowded. Because I couldn't get a space near the door I had to park a good ways away and had plenty of time to look at the cars lined up outside the entrance. That is why I noticed the three cars sitting out front and took it a step further by seeing that each car contained the same situation - all three cars had the windows down and a very bored-looking male sitting in the front seat, obviously waiting while the person they were with was running into the store to perform a quick task. What was funny to me is that it the first car had a young kid - probably 13 or 14. The next car had a man in his late 30s and the third car contained a man who was at least 70 years old. All I could think walking passed was that this just goes to show you that it doesn't matter how old a man gets, he is always being dragged out for errands he doesn't want to be a part of. I wanted to take a picture of the three cars and their occupants and Tweet out this very observation, but then I remembered I'm not always happy when people who I know decide to take my picture, so the last thing I would want is to have a total stranger slyly take my picture and then send it out to the internet without knowing what may be attached to it. Thus, I decided to pass.

Now, I am well aware that this uneasiness with secretly taking photographs of strangers makes me the internet exception and not the rule. If everyone shared my feelings toward this issue we wouldn't have the entertainment journalism industry, whose sole purpose in life appears to get pictures of celebrities when they don't know it and has influenced tons of people to follow in their footsteps whenever a slightly famous person is around. But, being sneaky is a skill which I simply don't possess and, really, I am fine with that. (You could make the case that even the professionals aren't that sneaky either because most people can tell when someone is trying to take their picture.) Even in this day and age of things like Instagram when people can post pictures to the internet easier than ever, being able to take pictures with a phone is still not a subtle act is actually something the cell phone makers have done which I actually like. Even if my phone is set to total silence, if I take a picture the camera will still make the tell-tale shutter click noise we all know and love, making discretely taking a picture almost impossible. Between that and the fact that camera phones are very awkward to hold when trying to be subtle, it is like the cell phone makers decided they could throw us just a couple of bones in the name of personal space. Considering how much of our personal information they already collect it does feel like the least they could do.

I know they say a picture is worth a thousand words, but every now and again just telling people what you saw would probably be the better course of action. Think about all the times you been embarrassed by pictures from your past and the unflattering story that presumably goes with them and then contemplate how a total stranger is going to feel about having one of their worst moments on the internet for all to see thanks to you. Even if they successfully contact you and make you take it down it will live forever somewhere. That is why I will leave the pictures of strangers with amusing captions for the rest of the world to create and I will stick to wordy blog posts. The only bad part about having to tell you this way is that I am doing so over the internet and because so many people have said so many absurd things while hiding behind their screen names that now the burden of proof has swung the other way and people are pretty much required to show pictures or else readers don't believe it actually happened. Frankly, you are just going to have to trust me on this one. But if you really need to see some pictures to believe a story feel free to go on the internet and do a simple Google search because there will be plenty of pictures for you to look at and, as we know, doctoring photos which appear on websites is very hard.