You can tell the amateurs from the professionals by the clothes and the equipment: The amateurs dress up in the shooting jackets and fumble about with the bags and straps. The professionals have the equipment, they just don't carry it draped all over their bodies so when the crucial moment arrives, they're busy shooting film while you're still tangled up in your camera straps.

I'm afraid I'm too naive. When I'm shooting an event such as a parade or a street fair or the like, I'm looking to photograph people who are generally unaware they're being shot. People's faces, when they're not "on camera", are the most interesting to me. This has its problems. We live in a time when it's less and less politically correct to shoot photographs of strangers, even in the middle of a festival or a parade.

My understanding of the legal rule is you can shoot anyone you like in a public place as long as you don't harass them and you don't use the photograph for commercial purposes without a model release. The reality is you try to judge the potential subject's emotional temperament and only shoot those people who don't look like they'll pull a gun or call on their friends to grind you and your cameras into the sidewalk. Unless the picture's just too damned good not to shoot. Of course.

So today I'm shooting pictures of the people as they prepare for the parade. The participants are usually up for being photographed: That's what the whole event is about, to "parade" before the public and show their stuff. I like the faces and the costumes and the masks and the colors so it all works out.

There's one little kid in a baby stroller with a pair of sun glasses on, plastic ones that give him a kind of laid back hip look, hipper, probably, than I've ever looked in my life, so I shot pictures of the kid just as I'd shot pictures of pretty much everyone else on the block.

I'd already been asked a couple of times who I was shooting for by the parade organizers to see if they should be pointing me in the right direction for publicity purposes. People's attitudes change if they find out you're from the local daily, but nobody really minds if you're an amateur either as long as you stay out from under foot. I would reply that I was shooting for myself, that I was an amateur, so when the father of this kid asked me the same question I said I was an amateur and that I usually put my pictures up on this web site. "What kind of a web site?"

Shit, I realize finally this guy is upset and asking these questions because he wonders if I'm some kind of weirdo who does things with pictures of little kids. Sells them to kidnappers. I'm not sure what you can do with a picture of a kid in a stroller wearing cool looking plastic sunglasses. I mean if you want that kind of picture, you can buy them ten at a time on postcards, download them from the Disney site.

Anyway, two things were going through my mind: First, that this was a father expressing a concern that maybe this guy shooting pictures was not what he seemed (and if there was even a whiff of that, he was quite correct to get in my face or whomever else's face and find out) and second, and this was just a hint, a feeling in the gut, that he was on some trip of his own, getting off on getting into my face, playing the aggrieved, but properly protective father. Before an audience. Which is weird and which is why I say I'm naive.

I once shot a picture of a woman who was participating in the Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco. She was dressed in a police uniform jacket and hat wearing fishnet stockings and high heels and I (what else?) shot a picture of her as she was marching toward me. Did I mention she was carrying a riding crop?

Well, she chewed me out for shooting a picture without her permission and then walked over to the TV people and gave an interview on camera. I didn't post that picture, but I posted others of the lady in the section of parade photographs.

I think it was Dan at the office who laughed when I told the story and said, my god, look at her, she's a control freak, she's on a dominance trip, what else would you expect? Don't feel guilty about it.

And the father, with impeccable justification, was doing his number on me in a way similar to the lady control freak. Just a feeling in the gut of my stomach, but its a feeling that's usually accurate. He was doing his number before the wife and whomever else. Nothing outrageous, a conversation really, but he was doing a number and I was the target. The inference was shameful and it made me quite upset.

So I expand my list of things to watch out for when shooting crowds: Mean assed bikers on speed, teenagers with a need to act out, guys with cigarette burns on the back of their hands and little kids in plastic sun glasses.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this guy had some terrible experience I'm not aware of or maybe fathers think about this kind of stuff a lot. If you read the press, its hard to miss. But I think not. I think he's done this before with other people under similar circumstances, some need to verbally push somebody around. I will say it wasn't pleasant.

I was hoping we'd have sun today and I'd get to shoot some photographs. Now I'm not sure I wouldn't have been happier with a rain out.

Besides, my hangup is younger chicks with come hither looks and pouty lips, about 45, running to 50.