Dude, there's some guy taking my picture! What should I do?

It was hard to resist taking several pictures of this young woman: she seemed so clean-cut, attractive, and well dressed as she stood in the square while chatting on her cell phone.

She then marched back and forth several paces, then went into the entrance to the 72nd Street subway station, came back out again, marched around, continued chattering on her cell phone, and occasionally glanced at me with a puzzled look as I snapped several pictures. A good ten minutes went by until she finally disappeared for good into the subway station, still chattering away on her cell phone...

Note: this photo was published in a Jul 9, 2009 photo titled "How to Ease Your Transition to Google Voice." It was also published in an Aug 1, 2009 XYHDTV blog titled "How Do I Know if She Likes Me?"

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This is part of an evolving photo-project, which will probably continue throughout the summer of 2008, and perhaps beyond: a random collection of "interesting" people in a broad stretch of the Upper West Side of Manhattan -- between 72nd Street and 104th Street, especially along Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue.

I don't like to intrude on people's privacy, so I normally use a telephoto lens in order to photograph them while they're still 50-100 feet away from me; but that means I have to continue focusing my attention on the people and activities half a block away, rather than on what's right in front of me.

I've also learned that, in many cases, the opportunities for an interesting picture are very fleeting -- literally a matter of a couple of seconds, before the person(s) in question move on, turn away, or stop doing whatever was interesting. So I've learned to keep the camera switched on (which contradicts my traditional urge to conserve battery power), and not worry so much about zooming in for a perfectly-framed picture ... after all, once the digital image is uploaded to my computer, it's pretty trivial to crop out the parts unrelated to the main subject.

For the most part, I've deliberately avoided photographing bums, drunks, drunks, and crazy people. There are a few of them around, and they would certainly create some dramatic pictures; but they generally don't want to be photographed, and I don't want to feel like I'm taking advantage of them. I'm still looking for opportunities to take some "sympathetic" pictures of such people, which might inspire others to reach out and help them. We'll see how it goes ...

The only other thing I've noticed, thus far, is that while there are lots of interesting people to photograph, there are far, far, far more people who are not so interesting. They're probably fine people, and they might even be more interesting than the ones I've photographed ... but there was just nothing memorable about them.