gpaai wrote:But just then, her boyfriend turned from a booth he was standing at to see who his GF was talking to. He was wearing a strap around his neck that was supporting what was obviously a professional camera and lens..
All of a sudden the guy begins to laugh as he looks at my camera and says, "Oh my God, another wannabe!"
To be perfectly candid with you, given to these circumstances, this is
exactly the sort of response you should hope for and want because it
positions you as just "cute" and non-treatening....... and that's just the
place you want to be so that you can concentrate on the work at hand
and in the end create images which by comparison run circles around
his sorry a**.
The pivotal factor in all this is that too often folks prematurely judge a
photographer not for their skill (i.e. what ever artistic talent and
craft faculty is in their head) but rather by the size of the tools they
carry.
This can be a disadvantage to us if we find ourselves in circumstances
where folks might seemingly take us a bit more seriously (and perhaps
be more inclined, for example, to give us access to certain places normal
tourist aren't allowed) if they see our big "serious" tools.
But the flipside of the coin is that there are other circumstances
(including the one you addressed here) where our greater advantage
with small tools is to sort of be like the Lieutenant Columbo of
photographers -- polite, unassuming, perhaps even seemingly like
a kind of half incompetent bumbler with a seemingly Micky Mouse
camera; not at all a threat to anyone but just the sort of person
who in half stealth mode gets the good job done.
So at least from where I sit, any time you get that kind of response
from the dude with the big bad lens (and I've had that happen to
me once or twice while shooting weddings for example -- some rich
doctor or lawyer wedding guest has better equipment than mine)
you can either choose to look at it as insulting, or else choose to use
it to your advantage.
The key in all of it seems to come down to this: In the end, it's not
the person who had the better camera that wins, as it were, but
rather the one who comes home with the better images.
And many a time, the person who comes home with the better
images might easily be the one who might have seemingly had
the most modest of camera gear.
So if such a dude perceives you as no source of competition and just
a sort of cute wannabe, you might regard that as a sort of blessing, just
like in the story of the Rabbit And The Tortuous -- looks can be deceiving,
and the wise photographer will often times use that to his or her
advantage.
So there's a bit of food for thought, for whatever that perspective
might be worth.
CJ
Wed Jun 30, 2004 9:07 am 
Gary