Unintentional Headshots

What is the best way to ruin a nice photo? These days it isn't as infuriating as those in the pre-historic era before the invention of digital cameras, but when someone walks into your photo and suddenly the beautifully framed picture of St Mark's in Venice is ruined because a party of five has just barged in front of your camera lens so they can read all the information about the Campanile.

This can be so irritating, and it happened to me so many times I started to do it to other people. 'How vindictive!' say you; 'Not so!' say I. If you search on the world wide interweb for people who barge into other people's photos you may well find pictures of me: putting my thumbs up, doing the odd cheese-filled grin, doing a Usain Bolt-style pose, maybe even just looking grumpy.

These were mild, however, compared to the unsurprising aspiration I had of giving someone else one of my jumping pictures. Whenever I'd see flocks of tourists I'd wait until they pulled out their cameras and jump for about half a minute to ensure someone caught me airborne.

Mmm... clever.

I know what you're thinking and just before you roll your eyes and dismiss me as a reckless youth, I want to explain my desire to inflict my jumping on other people.

First of all, life is unpredictable. Deal with it.
Secondly, I would much rather have someone jumping in my photo than someone's large forehead.
Thirdly, it is very rare that photographs are all printed, displayed and remembered forever. I have thousands of photographs, but the ones I remember are the quirky ones. When you subject your friends and families to your very samey holiday snaps it's right that you show them the picture of the funny girl who was jumping by the Brandenburg Gate.

This brings my very nicely to my next offering...

Surprise!

St Andrews Castle, 2009

My friend may have taken 100 photos of the castle in her time there at university. This is the only one I remember.