Nowadays, almost all tourists carry digital cameras, and a huge number of people take selfies as they travel. I often have fun taking sneaky photos of people photographing themselves, and I find it ironic that while the purpose of taking selfies is obviously to communicate with others (to share them of social media, etc.), people ask others to take their photo for them more and more rarely – the selfie mindset replaces this form of communication.
Of course, asking a stranger to take a photo has disadvantages. For one, there is a psychological barrier of striking a conversation. Perhaps, more importantly, there is no control of how the person would compose a shot. In my experience, the chance of getting a reasonably good photo by asking a random tourist to take it is less than 50%. More often than not, my face would end up dead centre in the frame and/or out-of-focus.
So selfies are not so bad in principle. Perhaps, the premise of taking a selfie is also useful when you want to take a sneaky shot of someone or something else. In “Ronin” (one of my favourite movies) Robert De Niro’s character would not have had to resort to tricks of asking someone to take a picture of himself if he had had an smartphone with a Chinese-made “selfie-stick”.
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