Photo Stories: Police on My Back by bloomchen

Sometimes when taking pictures I get addressed by strangers either because of my cameras or because they don’t want me to shoot something they claim they have responsibility for. But having the police on my back was a new experience.

At the time I took this picture, I worked all day, from dusk till dawn, and the only opportunity to take photos was in the evening or at night. What happened was that I took pictures on my way to practice Ultimate Frisbee.

On the day took this photo, I was on my way back home by car when I stopped on a bridge over the the Berlin city freeway. I was still in my sporty outfit and had my big tripod and Lubitel with me. While I was taking pictures, police passed by me and stopped. As it was terribly cold they didn’t even leave the car, but pulled down the window and yelled at me, asking what I was doing. Since I had a lot of negative experience with police in the past, my first thought was, “Boah, what do you want! Don’t you have better things to do?”

But as I turned around, they saw my cameras and so they only said, “Okay, go ahead!” But one guy eyeballed me and had this facial expression that said, Why the hell is this guy dressed in running shorts and a polar down jacket, running around in cold weather taking pictures of cars driving by?

At home, I thought about the situation again and asked myself what they thought I was doing. The only plausible idea I had was that they probably thought I was throwing down things at cars from the bridge. And then I was kind of happy they stopped and asked because some years ago, my brother got almost killed by an iron bar that somebody threw down from a highway bridge and destroyed his windscreen, missing him only about 30cm and got stuck in the backseat.

CAMERA USED: Lubitel 166+
FILM: Fuji Velvia 100 X-pro

written by bloomchen on 2015-02-26 #lifestyle #photo-stories #category-lifestyle #section-world