the tourist

when you are not travelling-in-a-relationship, you will be the designated photographer for a lot of random couples. sometimes i offer if i am in the middle of some deep ass swiss valley with no one in sight and they are struggling to rest their newly purchased dslr on a boulder of sorts. most of the times, if you are somewhere popular—paris, prague, (gah i'm out of p cities), rome, london—people just naturally form a line in front of a monuement and hand me their cameras as if i won't do that joke where i take a rapid step to run just to see their panic.

then, the polite couples will usually turn and ask me if i'd like a photo. i only said 'yes' once, in 2011. i was in london and there was some parade going on, a couple asked me to take their photo, and i did. then the couple asked if i'd like a photo, i passed them my camera and forgot about it.

months later i was looking through all the developed photos and there was just a random one of a blurred buckingham palace with a parade in front. it was kind of on an unintentional dutch angle, as if the shutter had pushed one side of the camera down. what is this photo??? i searched the photo like a page of where's wally for a clue of why i might have taken it. then in the lower left hand corner, i see my face, but just my face, taking up 1/20th of the frame. you'd think i accidentally walked into the shot.

though i feel like with instagram culture, most people are pretty good photographers these days? so i should try and say yes again in the future to finally update that profile picture from 2016.