My wife is Russian, and our family spent the weekend visiting her relatives in Brooklyn, New York. Saturday night was the main event, the celebration of her cousin Ilya's 50th birthday at a Russian restaurant. (The vodka flowed like water.)
I went armed with two SLRs: A Super Program and a Ricoh XR-P. About an hour into the event, I began to have flash problems with both cameras and had to quit. (The Super Program needed a new camera battery and new AAs in the flash; the XR-P's dedicated flash was a freebie that I had been told "may work erratically.") Just then, the "real" photographer arrived: a 50-something Russian man sporting a Nikon digital SLR on a large flash bracket. It's just as well that I can't shoot anymore, I thought; I wouldn't want to step on his toes. Well, this guy took maybe 20 pictures of people dancing and teenage girls posing by the window. I brought him a stool to stand on to get a better angle of the dancers, but he declined. Then he left. No table shots! (I hadn't taken any, either.) When I asked Ilya why the guy had taken so few shots, he explained how "it's been proven" that each time you take someone's picture, you take away part of their life energy. Whoever owns the print can hurt the person in the picture by--I dunno--tearing up the photograph. Ilya didn't want a stranger taking too many pics, not knowing what the photographer might do with them. Three years earlier, my live-in mother-in-law wouldn't let us keep a candid I had taken of my older daughter sleeping. "It's bad luck to be photographed while you're sleeping." No wonder these people lost the Cold War. At around midnight, the photographer returned with mounted 8-by-10 color prints at $10 each! They were sharp and well-lit, I thought. But several of the relatives declined, saying that too many flaws showed up in their faces or that he hadn't posed the girls well. "They look like your photographs," my mother-in-law's sister explained to me. (Hey--I don't claim to be a pro...or a poser!) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
