Just musing here, but this blog post is meant to be a gentle affirmation favoring proper touristing. So far on this trip, it’s been nice people all the way down. Maybe it is that the high season of bad behavior has not fully arrived, and also, Marcy and I tend to avoid the most crowded places. Or maybe we have just encountered a pocket of niceness.
I do leave it to your own imagination and experience about what constitutes bad tourist behavior. But for me, stories of “Tripod Wars” came to mind as Marcy and I circled over to the easiest, most distant and devoid-of-tourists view of Delicate Arch in Arches National Park.
Even if you don’t actually know the name or place, you have probably seen this famous natural arch scene, Your beautiful image would have been courtesy of some intrepid photographer, who probably arose at 2 AM to beat the mass of competitors, then drove up a narrow winding mountainside and navigated a 3 mile stretch of trail with 20 pound tripod in tow, watching out for pygmy rattlesnakes (and where people have fallen to their death.) Then, because s/he (I picture an old guy with a beard) arrived so early, it would have been cold, and the photographer would have shivered for hours on the very narrow bit of real estate available to get the shot. As the perfect light comes up, the masses arrive, cellphones galore certainly, and maybe a group armed with their own tripods who paid big money to have someone guide them to the perfect spot – right in front of our photographer.
I leave it to your imagination or your Googling about what happens next.
I remember feeling bad one time while viewing and photographing a bear, where someone stepped aside to let me have the best view, only because I was sporting an impressive camera and lens. I figured I had no more right than they did to get the shot. “Thanks, but anyone can buy a lens, stay where you are.” I would hope that photographers everywhere would get the message. However, from what I have read, Delicate Arch, featured in this post, might be a candidate for the epicenter of photographer entitlement – I am not sure what the answer might be, save requiring a psychological profile test for entry to prove that you are a “get-along” kind of person.
From our viewpoint, we saw no bad behavior. The little dots of people in the scene seemed to be delighting in the enjoyment of one of nature’s most beautiful scenes.
It is here that I might quote some rousing get-along kind of poetry, a famous quote or song lyrics – but you can do that on your own, because what I came up with contained their own notes of entitlement.
