angry bus driver

this evening i had an encounter with a local, Country Connection bus driver. i was out for an excursion in my town, San Ramon, California to take some experimental photographs with a new camera lens that arrived in the mail today.

it had just started to rain at 4pm and i knew i didn’t have much light left to work with. i drove off in my car hoping to catch some rays of sunshine brightening up autumnally colored trees against the black clouds of the sky. i ended up parking my car in the commuter spaces at the Transit Center in the Bishop Ranch office park.

i got out of the car with my umbrella because it was still raining lightly and i did not want my camera to get wet. i did not really know how to take photographs with this new lens so this was definitely a learning experience for me. i made a point of not walking into the transit center, although i did take some photographs of it.

i kept my attention on the changing lighting conditions fostered by the moving storm and the quickly approaching sunset. there were a combination of architectural and natural subjects that i concentrated on photographing. there were no people in the area at all. a few buses rode in and quickly exited the station.

so, eventually a very bright cloud burst occurred and there were gorgeous oranges and reds coming through the clouds, reflecting on both the office building and the wet pavement. i had been over to the side of the transit station taking photos on the Iron Horse pedestrian trail. i crossed back onto the pavement/parking lot of the office building to get a closer perspective on the reflecting light.

after i had taken a few photographs and the sun and clouds started to shift again, i turned around to walk back towards the hiking trail. off to my right, i noticed that a bus was coming quickly up the driveway. thinking quickly i thought that it might be interesting to photograph the bus blurring by in the light.

note that the Diana lens that i was shooting with is a special effects lens. it is made entirely of plastic and is in no means a high powered lens with zooming qualities of any sort. and i left my home without my camera bag that contained my better quality lenses, even though none of those are high powered zoom lenses either.

i took three photographs of the bus zooming by. then i turned around to see what i could shoot next. it was then that i noticed a big man burling towards me at a rapid pace.

it was the bus driver that had just drove past me. he had stopped his bus and was storming at me as if he were angry. i had no reason to think i had done anything to upset him. he didn’t shout, but he said quite demonstratively “Do you want to take my picture?” My first thought was, “Well, yes! You are quite an interesting looking fellow.” I was thinking that he’d make a good subject for the old “100 Strangers” project that I used to work on, and that it might be fun to start it up again. I saw him and his burly features, wrinkled bus drivers shirt, and tired face in a faint sepia print.

anyway, he was not offering to pose for me. he jumped right into an angry rant that “you can’t just stand out in the middle of the street taking pictures of people driving by”, and that, “one day you are going to piss someone off and get your strap wrapped around your neck and your camera shoved down your throat”. i swear to god, that is what he said.

so i dumbly stumbled for words to defend myself. “i’m just a local artist. do you want to see the photos i took of your bus?” i showed him the three blurry photos and that seemed to calm him a little bit, to the point at least that he did not touch me or my camera.

he went back to his bus and drove off. i was not frightened, but was slightly ruffled. i had never been verbally assaulted like that by anyone before. the time i was told i could not take photos at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago was different. there was no confrontation.

i meandered slowly back to my car, waiting to see if the driver was going to take his bus back into the roundabout where my car was parked. i didn’t see the bus appear until i got right up to my car. i waved at him, but he did not smile. in fact, he parked his bus and approached me again. this time he had a piece of paper in his hand and wrote down my car’s license number. i said, “would you like my card too?”. “no, its just that there was an incident here last week and i’m a little spooked.” i asked, “what happened?” he said, “it’s none of your business.” then we both walked away, got into our vehicles and drove off.

i know i was doing nothing wrong and that i simply crossed the path of a suspicious man that has probably been on the job too long. i’m not afraid to take photos in my town, but i will be careful of taking photos of these buses now in case i come across this driver again.

so that is what happened to me today. just thought i’d share.

 

(as a side note, i finally learned that i need to shoot in manual mode with this lens and i need to stop down my aperture 1-2 stops to get properly exposed photographs. more photos can be seen here: Diana Photo Experimenting - Flickr)