This photo I took in Macau back when I was traveling has always cracked me up. So serious, people, so serious! And it pops into my memory every time I see people taking tourist photos. It is entertaining to sit at a tourist spot and just watch different people's posing styles - like when seeing tourists at the World Trade Center site in New York who stood solemnly looking directly at the camera while someone took their picture, I'm assuming because it is pretty inappropriate to smile for the camera in front of such a tragic place. But they still were in the picture, as if to prove to all their friends back home that they were in fact there. Anyways, I love watching people and how they set up their subject while taking a tourist photo. There are those who pose crazy, mouths open wide or jumping in the air, as if they are having the best time in their entire life at the very moment the picture is taken, those who smile normally (or sometimes awkwardly, as if the camera has brought out their bug-eyes and their huge, totally unnatural top and bottom teeth smile), or those who just plain stand there. Or, the most entertaining, those who have had plenty of practice in front of the mirror, have memorized their "good side" and their most flattering angle. I get it. If it works, it works.
Anyways, (I AM going somewhere with this) I was reading a photography blog and saw this guy's work of tourists taking photos and loved it. He shows the people who are taking the photos, rather than the subjects, but it is still entertaining to watch the thought that goes into it: the person contorted to get that perfect angle, encouragement from the traveler's friend that the angle is great, the satisfaction that their photo will be SO different from all the others...when in the end it will probably end up in the back of a photo album, or filed online along with all the other millions of shots we take as evidence that we have traveled. That's where mine all are!
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