Week 8 - sushi

Quit Thinking So Hard

Rachel suggested to me recently that in my zeal to practice deliberate, planned, painterly portraits, I was running the risk of neglecting what she considered to be one of my strengths: spontaneous portraiture. I usually keep a 35mm camera in my car and tend to take it out whenever we're at a restaurant or a coffee shop (I finished graduate school but Rachel didn't, that's about all you have time to do in her shoes).

The result is that I have about a billion pictures of Rachel drinking tea, but I also end up with some good pictures not only of her but of my other friends as well.

Like this one from 2011, at the old Kerbey Lane location on South Lamar

Or this one of my friend Don, also from 2011, at the Parlor in Hyde Park

So, with that in mind, I took my Nikon F3HP with me when we went out for veggie sushi at one of our favorite places, Banzai. That's when the fun started.

They're Talking About Us

As usual, I sat down with Rachel at a two-top and started snapping away. One of the great things about buying film in bulk is that you can usually afford to be liberal with your shots; coupled with my sometimes-troubling lack of compositional discipline, this leads me to take all kinds of crazy pictures.

Thus, the sight of me leaning in and out of Rachel's face with a camera and shooting weird things like her hands is a fairly common one if you hang out in the same restaurants we do. I am actually quite mortified of being disruptive or making people uncomfortable--which is why I'm afraid of street photography--so while I'm sure I look silly I try never to bother anyone. I won't even fire the shutter if it's very quiet in the room.

At one point while we were there, I decided that I was tired of the angles available to me from where I was sitting. Rachel (because she is an amazing sport and very supportive) suggested that we switch sides, which would move the light to another side of her face and change the background.

That's when she noticed it.

Two college-aged girls sitting at a table in another part of the restaurant apparently thought it was worthy of their scorn that I should take pictures of my partner in a restaurant. Rachel noticed that they were giggling and overheard one of them say "oh, now they're changing sides." She said this in a tone of voice one would use for the punchline to a hilarious joke.

One of them was wearing a UCLA shirt, leading me to believe she's at least spent some time in Los Angeles. I find it hard to believe she never encountered people taking photos in public before. Perhaps I'm biased, but when I encounter people taking photos in public my thoughts are generally either "crap, am I in their shot?" or "is that a Leica?"

My point is: these girls were judging us for doing something perfectly acceptable and that I would think could be seen as sweet. I still like taking Rachel's picture after five years, and while I usually don't like drawing attention to myself in public I am damn sure not ashamed of making nice pictures of the woman I love.

Rachel immediately locked her s-foils in attack position and, not quietly, said "those girls are laughing at us. I hope they can read my lips right now."

Apparently they could because they immediately got very uncomfortable and refused to make eye contact with her. Perhaps they could feel the shame-stare. Says Rachel: "I usually try really hard not to be formidable, but I made an indignant exception."

I for one thought the entire experience was highly amusing.

"They can. They know I caught them. They're not even looking over here anymore." And, sure enough, within a few minutes they quietly and quickly walked out the restaurant past us while averting their eyes.

While some college kids laughing at me is really the least of my troubles, I still wanted to tell this story. I'm trying to decide if there's anything I can learn from it, and the best I can come up with after thinking about it is this:

When you practice a creative hobby, sometimes you'll look silly. Maybe you won't look silly to everyone, and maybe you won't look silly all the time. But sometimes, somewhere, someone is going to give you a hard time for it. And that sucks.

I said earlier that I'm afraid of street photography because I am afraid of making a scene or getting in people's faces or interrupting their privacy. I don't particularly like being the center of attention, despite what you may believe if you saw the stuff I did on college TV. But the thing is this: carrying around a 30+ year old manual film camera in public is going to make me an object of interest. I'm going to have to deal with the fact that people are going to notice it, they're going to say things, and yes, they may laugh at me.

But at the end of the day, I'm the one with the nice photos. So whatever.