I think she just sounds like an odd person. Let it go.
Here’s the part that strikes me as weird:
She wants a picture of them together, since she doesn’t have any. Totally fine. But a picture at such a distance would render the photo pretty moot, since it’d be hard to make out the baby (assuming it’s a newborn/few months old).
Most people want such pics with their faces larger in the frame; recognizable and more intimate.
Maybe she wanted the photo to be obviously taken by a third party. Selfie distance could be argued there wasn’t someone else taking the picture. Yeabuttimer you say, the OP didn’t tell us what kind of phone/camera it was, could it have been an older model with no rear camera or timer? Or she could argue it was someone holding the camera because she would have to be a loon to put it on timer and leave it at that distance for anyone to come by and run off with it.
I’m going with DooWahDiddy’s explanation as the one that best explains the situation.
Another theory - she is trying to get a photo similar to another one she has because she wants to create a series. Maybe this is her second child, and she has a cute picture of herself with the first one in the same spot/perspective, or maybe her sister has a similar photo of herself with her child … nah, I’m really reaching and can’t even convince myself that this is a possibility.
One thing, though: my phone allows you to zoom in/out with a quick swipe. I don’t know about all phones, but in most cases wouldn’t you be able to do at least minimal zooming somehow? Maybe the camera was on a different setting than what the woman thought it was, and she anticipated a different amount of material in the frame than the OP was actually getting.
choie, I love the fact that you are a mystery writer! Does this incident get your creative juices flowing at all?
Boring answer – She has a picture, maybe of her mom holding her as a baby, from that exact same spot. She wanted to recreate that picture, or maybe splice the two of them together, or something to that effect, but she didn’t want to get into the whole backstory with you.
Exciting answer – Remember Ronin, when Sam and Deidre go to the hotel to do some recon. Sam asks some random guy to take pictures of him and Deidre, and then asks him to get the background, and then says, “Let me take a few of you with my wife.” Spy shit. Yep.
eta: Gah! Day old thread and I get ninja’d at 2am 
What? It’s 2:20 in the afternoon 
…said the poster in Indonesia.
Y’all are cracking me up with the possibilities. But I am slightly relieved to be validated that my hinkometer is correctly calibrated–this is something a tad peculiar.
Whew. Thanks, Green Bean. I tend to be a somewhat catastrophic/pessimistic thinker–something I’m trying to fight–so when I started worrying that I’d inadvertently helped a blackmarket baby smuggler or something :D, I thought maaaaaybe I’m wrong and there’s a perfectly simple explanation and it’s a normal thing to ask.
(Er, not that you’ve confirmed the blackmarket baby smuggling ring theory, but at least I’m not the only one who’d find this curious.)
Wow, you’re good at coming up with worst-case scenarios too! I actually thought of another possibility as to why she has no pics of her and her 1-year-old kid (except it still doesn’t explain the distance thing): maybe the kid’s in the dad’s custody and they live elsewhere, so the mom doesn’t see the baby very often. Finally she’s getting a visit from the child and get a proper picture with her. (We can embellish the tale and have the mom lose custody due to, I dunno, drug or alcohol issues, and she’s been in rehab all this time.)
Medical explanation for distance thing, possibly sci-fi: Maybe mom also has some weird eye/brain malfunction where she can’t recognize people from close up. :dubious:
ROTFLMAO. “Hey little daughter, see that picture on the nightstand? I thought it’d be fun to recreate what the driver saw when he plowed through your daddy!”
(Let’s turn this to a horror movie plot, M. Night Shyamalan version: She and the baby were the ones killed, and now they’re ghosts who send this photo to torment the taxi driver. Or, less paranormal and more Lifetime Movie: it was the mom’s twin sister and niece who were the victims. This now-mourning and vengeful mom needs to recreate the photo from a distance so that the guilty cab driver won’t be able to tell this mom/daughter pairing aren’t the same.)
So this makes me the lead in a Hitchcock-esque “innocent person is framed for something” plot? Can I be played by January Jones? I know she looks nothing like me but she’d be a perfect Hitchcock heroine.
…This could possibly be the most likely answer. Maybe despite my certainty that there was no partner around, s/he was sneakier than I thought, perhaps hiding in the bushes behind me? (If so, mom-with-baby didn’t think this through carefully, because by lugging around a baby, she’s not exactly able to run if her partner-in-crime were successful and they needed a fast getaway.)
I’m glad you mentioned this, because that was part of my OP too–what should I have said? One of my many issues is my inability to say no to strangers, as well as my shyness, so I don’t argue and just do what people tell me. (How the hell I’ve survived in NYC this long I have no idea!)
I do get this, although it’s a shame that people end up in that position. But what makes me balk at the explanation is mainly the notion that this woman waited to find a complete stranger on a drizzly day to take this one picture? That was the best opportunity she had to take a picture with her kid after 12 months or so? Hey maybe it’s possible, but if so this gal needs to widen her social circle.
I hear you when it comes to people who take dozens and dozens of selfies, especially when it’s not like they’re standing at the Grand Canyon or have their arm around Benedict Cumberbatch or anything remotely interesting–just their mug two inches from the camera.
But we’re not talking about that. This is a mom and her child. Technically I don’t call that a selfie, that’s a… picture of a mom and her child. As much as I roll my eyes at many selfies, even I think it’d be perfectly understandable to take a photo with your new kid.
Well… until cellphones developed cameras, most people didn’t have access to a camera every day. And (though I could be wrong) even digital cameras weren’t as convenient for a solo photography as modern smartphones, which have the camera lens on the same side as the display and thus enabling regular folks to see themselves while snapping the image.
Annoying, yeah. Self-absorbed, sure. Disquieting? That’s further than I’d go.
Party pooper! 
I’ve met my share of freaky people, and what’s unusual about this woman is that except for the request, she came across as an utterly normal, friendly person. The freaks here might start off seeming normal, but before long you can sense the quirks bleeding through. This woman had no apparent quirks other than the request.
Precisely what I thought! That’s why I got up and took the photo from about… oh, three feet away, and turned slightly so the baby’s face could be seen better. It was a nice shot. When she preferred that I take the pic from a distance where she and the baby took up maybe 1/3 of the screen? Yeah that’s the weird part.
Hmm, a possibility. It was an iPhone (one of the reasons I wasn’t sure how to use it–strictly Android girl here) and seemed newish, at least it was larger than the older iPhones I’ve seen. But since I’m so unfamiliar with them, I could absolutely be wrong.
Actually a few people including Girl from Mars and steronz are bringing this up as a rather nostalgic possibility, and I don’t think it’s far-fetched. Actually, my own sister did this with her daughter, when my niece participated in the Tanglewood music festival. 30 years ago, my late mom took my other then-teenaged sister to Tanglewood, and took a lovely photo sitting underneath a tree. My sisters and I have always treasured that picture since our mom died only a few years later. Anyway, when my niece and my sister went there, they found the same tree and recreated the picture. It was touching to see both pictures side by side.
Sooo that’s the long way of saying: that is a possible explanation. Maybe not the right answer, and it doesn’t answer why this is the only shot she has of her kid, but at least it’s a reasonable option.
That’s also quite possible. Although… after I took that second photo, she looked at it and said it was perfect, so… I guess she really just wanted that distance.
It certainly does. Any of the above possibilities could work. For a more straightforward mystery, I can imagine a thriller about a woman unwittingly enabling a kidnapping, and ends up obsessed with trying to find the missing child. Danger and intrigue result.
I’ve never seen Ronin, but now I’m thinking of a spy thriller where this was all a ruse to get a photo of something behind her–maybe someone was in one of the shops I mentioned, or (if we really want to get spyish) the signage on one of the shops contained a special code word, and Natasha the fake mom needed to take a photo of herself in front of this code word in order to send a cryptic message to her contact!
Yep we can do this ad infinitum! Maybe one day I’ll open Craigslist and see an ad with someone asking for anyone who saw a young woman and baby standing near the Tram to contact a post office box address as soon as possible…
You said the baby was well-dressed, but was it really, really ugly? That might explain the desire for distance.
I like the “she wants it to be obvious she is with someone” theory. Maybe she could be trying to make someone jealous or needs to fake a relationship for some reason.
Not so sure about the theory of a bag-snatch. If someone leapt out of the bushes and ran off with your bag, and the woman/baby combo also hot-footed it (the most likely scenario), then you’re left holding a camera with her fingerprints (possibly) and several photos of her on it to take to your nearest friendly cop-shop.
Much easier just to plain mug you.
Just because you see nothing of significance in the spot doesn’t mean it doesn’t hold meaning for her. Maybe that’s where Grampa’s store used to be? Maybe that’s the exact spot she met baby Daddy? Or where her hubby proposed? Or baby was conceived, late one drunken summer night? It could be any of a million banal things that she’s a titch embarrassed to share.
Maybe it’s a proof of life thing, but not for ransom. Since you can’t make out the baby’s face, only approximate age and colouring, it’s to get child support for a child who was actually given up for adoption. Or to blackmail the rich sperm donor. That would explain her carrying a “borrowed” baby and not having a stroller. Carrying a one year-old around for any length of time would be exhausting. Okay, the theory has flaws . . . I’ll keep mulling . . .
Well thing is we all have times when we what I call “Go Stupid”. I had a thread on this awhile back where many people on this board admitted to doing this. Its where even totally intelligent people will on occasion, do something or forget something. For example, they forget where they live, or their phone number, or their passwords, or any number of things. Or they say things and later “what did I say?”. It happens and doesnt mean your crazy or anything its just that your brain suddenly goes down. No problem. You laugh at it later.
Or maybe come up with a theory about aliens or time travel or something.
Yeah, this is why I don’t think this was it either.
If you still feel weird about it, and have a lot of extra time, you could go down to the police station and ask to look at pictures of missing children. Maybe it would put your mind at ease, if nothing else.
Summer 1968 - I was in Ocean City, MD with my friend Jeanette. We were walking along the beach and I held my cheapie B&W camera at arm’s length to my right and snapped a shot of the two of us in profile - pretty much just our faces.
Did I invent the selfie way back then??? I can dig out the photo to prove it!
Okay-- so far, the thread’s been fun, full of mysterious musings about the woman, with nothing to really explain her motives.
But now I see a fact that may be relevant: that three-foot closeup.
I ain’t no New Yorker, but from my visits there:
It seems to me that in the big, bad city full of strangers, people tend to be a little more suspicious of others,–and a lot more careful about their personal space-than, say, in small towns.
Moving in quickly from the bench( which is a safe distance away), to having your own face and hands within touching distance of her baby may have seemed weird to her. Just as the OP thinks it was wierd for her to back away.
She may be starting a thread somewhere on else on the internet titled “Help me figure out this odd encounter with a stranger approaching my baby”
This is the first thing that came to mind for me as well. I have a shot of my two kids that’s a near-exact replica of a shot of me and my brother when we were little, and yeah, I made sure it was at exactly the same distance and angle.
I also have very few pics of me with my kids, because I’m always the one taking the photos.
Maybe my weirdness meter is under-sensitive but …
I think “no pictures” may be idiomatic for “very few pictures.” Not wanting a close-up does seem odd, but might have a mundane explanation. Perhaps she’s unfamiliar with photography (suggested by the fact that she has few photos of herself with baby). For example, she might know that she can digitally zoom the photo later, but isn’t fully aware of the resultant blurriness.
Choie, I’d love to read one of your mysteries! Can you PM me info?
Maybe she’d recently lost some weight and wanted to show off her whole body?
I know that’s not a fun explanation, but it’s the first thing I thought of.
Choie, it’s tough to run carrying a baby. You shoulda sprinted off with her phone!