I'm an idiot.
Once, a few years ago, I had my digital camera with me and was out taking pictures with it. I enjoy photography, but I don't pursue it all the time. Sometimes I get the bug and I go looking for things to photograph.
So I walk into this Krispy Kreme and there's a field trip of all these little kids, faces excited, looking through the window at the doughnut assembly line. It's a Norman Rockwell moment, so I pull out my camera and take a few pictures.
And I get confronted by one of the moms. And I realize that here I am, an adult male taking pictures of little kids. I explained what I was doing, offered to delete the pictures, told her I had a daughter at home, etc.
But the suspicion, for obvious reasons, did not go away.
I felt sick for days over it. I saw something beautiful and didn't think twice about what I was doing, and to be suspected of that, well...it stunk.
And it's because of guys like this.
I walk around with a fairly big professional-looking camera, so when I take pictures of my own children in public places like zoos/parks/museums/etc I try to be very careful to not have other children in the frame. Last vacation my daughter and another little girl were playing together so cutely that I just had to take a picture of them, so I went over and introduced myself to the other mom, asked if it was okay to take the picture (which she said it was), and if it was okay to post the picture on my blog (which she said it wasn't). You can't be too careful.
What I find really scary isn't so much people with cameras that look like cameras taking pictures, because you can usually tell that they're doing it--it's that someone with a cell phone could take a picture of me and my children and I'd have no clue that they'd done it, because for all I know they're text messaging.
Commenting by HaloScan
