What’s With All the Photo Bullies?

It is sometimes very hard for more than one "serious" amateur dive photographer to share the same dive boat, let alone take turns photographing the same subject. Like Gollum wearing the gold ring of invisibility in The Lord of the Rings, holding a big camera rig seems to turn some people into selfish creatures who no longer can see other divers at all. Their tunnel vision creates an almost total lack of awareness of how their behavior might be offending other divers. That lack manifests itself in the behavior of photo-hogging.

Fortunately, my group in the Philippines was good about sharing. But I witnessed one incident where, as the first diver to spot a subject was lining up his shot, a second diver from an entirely separate group actually inserted his camera (and head) between the (smaller) camera and photo subject of the first diver. A third diver tapped his tickle stick on the strobe arm of the rude diver to get his attention. The offended diver made dramatic faces and pretended to jab the rude one with his tickle stick behind his back. But none of this had any effect, as the crazed subject-hog kept snapping photos, then swam away as if the other two divers had not existed at all. The other two divers looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders.