annoying girl/guy with camera

Once upon a time not long ago I was obsessed with taking pictures. I had a cheap little digicam that I got while I was on holiday in Hermanus and I just snapped away at everything. This made sense when I lived in the middle of nowhere because all the things I was seeing there were just so bizarre. There were baboons in the middle of the road, and sometimes a father and son team would get into their bakkie and chase them off the road with their AK47.

There were also endless white beaches filled with shells and sometimes, during whale season, I could spot a few whales going about their business in the deep blue sea.

So when I eventually left my precious bundus (Aniston, Bredasdorp and Gansbaai ) I was back in civilized Cape Town. But I had picked up this annoying habit of taking pictures of everything. So when I went out with friends I would take the pictures of food. Just in case they found that a little weird I would take pictures of their food as well. And if they promised not to grin at me, I snapped them as well.

This behavior carried on in the train. I would take a pictures of the sunrise, sunset, Table Mountain at dawn and just random people going about their business on the train or in areas around the train. I was like an annoying little tourist in my own country. In my defence I will say that I never used the train until I moved to Cape Town and the whole thing is just fascinating.

When the weekend rolled back into town it was off to Long street and I would still be taking pictures of everything. I could justify the performers in my pictures but never could quite understand why I had car guards and drunken people in my pictures.

But slowly I got over this habit or perhaps it was because I realised that I had no use for most of the pictures I was taking. Because there are only so many pictures of my friends and I laughing like crazy hyenas that I can load on facebook before it all got boring and monotonous.

But wait there is a point to this rant...

http://www.gooya.us/photos/2007/10/30/girl-iran-camera.jpg

 You see as much as I love to take pictures of all things bright and not-so-beautiful, I hate having my picture taken. And this week I was confronted with a group of consistent snappers. Like a hypocrite I was so annoyed and I made my annoyance felt. But deep down in my heart I knew that I was once that annoying girl with a camera. So to an extent I felt why they had a need to fill their camera up with pictures of people sitting around in the cold, drinking, smoking like they don't have work in a few hours (it was wayyy after midnight). What I really wanted to do was explain to them how stupid they are going to feel a year or so from now thinking back to a night where they were annoying people with a tiny little digicam instead of sitting down and drinking their wine like the rest of the people gathered there.