Flickr Taxonomy - The Girl Watchers

As I spend more and more time on Flickr, I tend to notice a few characteristics of other photographers that use the site. From these characteristics, I've been mentally filing them away into different groups of photographers. Now that they've been in my head long enough, I figure I'll do a little post series on the taxonomy of Flickr.

First up, the bottom of the barrel.

The Girl Watchers

The stalkers of Flickr, and also my least favorite group of users on Flickr. It is easy to identify their photography by a few key elements.

1) The blatent use of 100mm or longer lenses.

2) Images are always shot from the behind the subject, or at thier flank. In the rare cases when they are positioned in the the font, the image is either obviously shot from the hip, or taken with a lens which has a focal length more suitable for capturing wild lions.

3) Subjects are always female. Never too old, and never too plump.

I hold disdain for this group for a few reasons.

A) The often try to pass themselves off as legit street photographers. I'll admit, legit street photography is inherently voyeuristic, but legit street photography doesn't hide in the shadows, and legit street photography doesn't only target subjects with high sex appeal.

B) It is these type of photographers that feed the general population's paranoia against the rest of us that results in cases such as the incident where a father was branded a pervert for taking photographs of his own children, or when I got accused of being a rapist by the police for taking photographs.

C) They always seem to get way more views & comments than I do. ::huff::

More Flickr Taxonomy

• The Girl Watchers
• The This is my life users
• The Gearheads