“Theres a difference between 20 years of experience and one year of experience 20 years over.” -William Deming

Most people don’t care at all. Some who do won’t say anything. I’ve never had an issue.

Some tips, there’s a few ways to go about this:

1. Be sneaky. Shoot from the hip. Act like your camera is broken or you’re trying to adjust it, or you’re reviewing photos. I don’t like this “style”. For starters, you’re acting like a creep and if caught it’s hard to get away from that. It will also never help you get over your anxiety and will actually reinforce it. And you’ll probably screw up some potentially good shots.

2. Be obvious. Don’t try any tactics to sneak a picture. Look like you belong there and act professional. I have some business cards with links to my site and qr to my Instagram ready. As if I’m a photographer.

Side note, some of my favorite photos are when I was “caught”, and the subject is looking directly at the camera.

I just spent two weeks in Japan. We were in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and Nara.

I took 3000 photos. I shared 600 of those. I whittled down about 100 that I’m proud enough to put into a book.

So that’s about a 20% “facebook worthy” rate and 3.3% “portfolio worthy” rate.

Now that’s also keeping in mind that you can point at basically anything in Japan and capture something worth printing, with enough patience.

I live in South Carolina, so… not so much here.