A Year in Photos: How to get Yelled at by a Hobo

San Francisco has a LOT of homeless people. Mostly, they keep to themselves. Sometimes, however, they decide not to. Now, let me first preface this by saying that in eight months of daily trips to SF, this is the first interaction I've had with a hobo that is in any way close to negative. Most are quite, many friendly, even. Last Monday, though , I had one yell at me for taking pictures of the Embarcadero and the artwork on it.

It ended uneventfully. I had crouched to take a couple photos of a column. The hobo began yelling about it being illegal to photograph people. First off, young photographers reading this post, photographing people on the street is in fact NOT illegal in the U.S. There's neither a right nor expectation of privacy. That is if those people are on the street. Now, if you're standing there with your camera and photographing inside someone's home, well, I'm pretty sure that's illegal. And you'd deserve to die in a fire if you did that. Just saying.

So this hobo begins yelling at me and threatening to go buy a video camera and record me photographing things. I stood up, looked at him, and said "yeah, okay." He may not have realized, while I was crouching, that I'm 6'4". He decided to drop the issue and left basically in a run. Want to see the photo he yelled at me for taking?

1/1,000th, f8.
Technically it has people. I framed this shot terribly. My hope was to have the blocks be 1/4 of the final frame each and the blurry street scene the other half. The rest of my evening stroll was lovely and uneventful. Here are some more photos from the day.

1/60th, f4.
"Sir, please, kind sir, I was washed up on the sidewalk here by a big wave. Can you please carry me back to the water?" the turtle said as I walked past.
"Can I take your photo first? It's not every day one meets a talking tortoise."
"Yes, and technically I'm a sea turtle. Tortoises live on land, have big shells. See my hydrodynamic shell? I'm purpose-built for the water."
"Uh-huh." I took the photo, knowing now why no one had taken the sea turtle back to the water. No one wants to save a sarcastic sea turtle, just the cute and quiet ones that come ashore to lay their eggs and not bother people. And, heck, as a civilization we can't really bring ourselves to save those sea turtles. What chance do the sarcastic ones have? "Well, thank you very much for that. Let's get you to the water." I picked up the turtle and began walking toward my Muni stop."
"Sir, kind sir, I don't mean to be a pest, but the water is that way."
"The bay is that way, sure, but you didn't specify the bay. I guess you should have been more specific. The water you're going to is in a pot at my house." I'm glad to report that silly sarcastic turtle soup is just as tasty as the cute and quiet turtle soup.