WANT to inflict maximum inconvenience on anyone nearby when you’re taking a photo? Here’s how:
Location, location, location
Find a busy pedestrian bottleneck near a feature of interest and stand right in the middle of it. Announce loudly that you’re taking a photo and leave no space for anyone to get past. The general public are courteous up to a point, so they will wait ten seconds for you to take the picture and then push past, muttering ‘Prick’ under their breath.
Never rush composing
Composition is the key to a good picture, so take as long as you need telling people where to stand and loudly tutting at any random member of the public getting in the way of your masterpiece. As if them getting to work on time is as important as you taking an arty long exposure shot of your family right outside the entrance to King’s Cross station.
Be a technical f**kwit
Cameras are no longer point-and-click boxes, especially on phones with numerous settings. Spend ages fannying about with zoom, flash and filters, before realising you need to delete 300 pictures to make room in the memory. When you’re finally happy with the settings you’ll end up accidentally doing a video and having to start again, by which time the beautiful sunset other people were also hoping to photograph from this vantage point will have gone.
Hog the best spots
You want to take a photo of your kids standing in front of a tiger at the zoo, but it only paces by once every ten minutes. Rather than taking one picture, hoping it’s good and moving out of the way for the next family, hog the space and don’t let your cold, bored children go anywhere, while the other parents grow increasingly pissed off and start murmuring about decking you.
Dick about taking selfies
If you aren’t making enough of a nuisance of yourself taking pictures of other people, try taking some of yourself. As you stumble around attempting to get both your face and the Angel of the North in shot you’ll walk into several people, stand on someone else’s feet, elbow an old lady in the back and finally trip over a baby in a buggy. And your photo will still be shit.
