I don’t like the selfie obsession either, but when it comes to reprehensibility, I don’t get the difference between ‘a photo of me and my baby taken by a third party’ and ‘the exact same photo of me and my baby taken by me’.
People have always approached strangers to say, ‘Hi, would you mind taking a photo of me and my sweetie in front of the Eiffel Tower?’ or whatever. Now they just take the same picture themselves. I don’t see where this dooms society.
Because it couldn’t be something as simple as she’s duplicating a photo of herself, as a baby, in her own mothers arms? In just that spot, shot just that way?
(I’m really not getting how this is hinky or weird or possibly nefarious, in any way whatsoever!)
Alternative theory: by ‘no pictures of me with the baby’ she meant ‘no full-length shots of me with the baby’. She can do the close-ups herself, but she can’t get a full-length selfie, so that’s why she needed your help to begin with.
My wife is always complaining that most of the pictures of the baby have me in them, because she’s on the other side of the camera. I’ve become more aware of trying to get her in the shot, but 90% of the baby/parent pictures we have are baby + me.
I could totally see my wife doing exactly what this lady in the OP did, completely without anything nefarious in mind. She just wants a pic of her and babe, and dammit it’s going to framed the way she wants, Ansel.
choie, you said she didn’t have a stroller - did she have a diaper bag? I can see taking a baby out and about without a buggy or stroller, but the diaper bag is utterly essential.
But what if baby lady’s job was to distract our heroine during the pilferer’s escape? “Wait, you have my phone!” giving him precious seconds to make his getaway.
Something definitely is hinky about the described encounter. We are supposed to believe that a New Yorker was polite enough to take a stranger’s photo on the street, rather than telling them to fuck off? What exactly was the OP up to? I suppose we’ll never know! 
I have two kids and I’ve never owned a diaper bag. They confuse me. I had a ziploc bag that held a nappy, a bunch of wipes, a mini jar of Vaseline and a plastic bag for disposal, and I shoved the ziploc into my handbag on my way out.
I don’t have a lot of pictures of myself as well, so I might be tempted to ask a kindly looking stranger to take one of me with my phone, just so I have it on my phone.
Some people take really bad photographs, so your woman may not have even been aware that the background wasn’t very scenic, or just didn’t care. As far as the distance, I would think she wanted a full length shot and wanted to make sure you got it, or didn’t realize how far away she appeared in the picture. Easy enough to crop out what you don’t want. Plus, some people are not comfortable with close ups.
In the past, I’ve asked friends and strangers to take photos of me and been astounded at how bad they are. Me cut off at the waist with half the picture empty sky above me, a picture of me on a horse, with the horse’s head and legs out of the picture. Not everyone takes good photos.
In a city, where people live in smaller apartments, it’s not uncommon to take the kid outside to stretch their legs and get some fresh air, sans supplies.
Me too!
Well we’ve solved the case of the stolen cell phone now that it’s been recovered and it has choie’s fingerprints all over it.
People have been taking self-portraits ever since the invention of the camera. And before that, artists would paint their own self-portrait.
Well, I mean, sure, but if there’s one group of people that never happens to, it’s new parents, right?
I’m a NYC mom, and I have very few photos of me and my daughter when she was a baby, because I was always taking the pictures. It’s also hard for me to take a selfie with a baby … okay first, I have short arms so my selfies suck anyway, then add a baby to the mix and those pictures are absolute crap. Sure, I have some, but they aren’t the pictures I’m excited to share with others. (And in threads where expecting and new Doper parents ask for advice, my advice is always to share who takes the pictures so that one parent doesn’t look back and realize they aren’t in 99% of the photos - because I have heard this from so many parents that I think it’s pretty common.)
The taking it from a distance, that seems okay too. Sometimes you want a close up, sometimes you want a picture that is more “experiential,” I guess … something like capturing mom and baby having a walk in the neighborhood. With a close up, you could be almost anywhere. If she lived in the area and wanted a picture that showed a typical activity for her, it doesn’t matter that there is nothing of note in the background.
However, even though I don’t think either point (saying she has no pictures nor wanting a shot from farther away) is particularly odd … I absolutely think that if you picked up something odd in her affect, or tone, or the way she was presenting the situation, that it very well could be odd. You were there, and if there was a weird vibe, you’re picking up on it.
No one took selfies in the pre-digital camera era because they always came out blurry. Maybe someone can corroborate, but I believe the focal length on those 35mm standard cameras was too long for a normal person to be able to hold at a sufficient distance away from their body and still be in focus.
I took many selfies and every last one of them was an out-of-focus waste of expensive film and developing.
Anyway, to address the actual topic, it is pretty clear what happened. Ten months or so after an ill-advised fling with a downtown i-banker, this young mother recently discovered that her child will only suckle human blood, so she has to find isolated people to keep her baby fed. Unfortunately, you were so unfailingly polite that she just didn’t have the heart to harvest you. DiBlasio is trying to avoid public panic by scrubbing all media reports including the words: “exsanguinated Roosevelt Island tram operators.”
You’ve been busy! That’ll teach me to get up late.
Here, in my starkly true-to-life rendering, is the site of the Incident, complete with representation of the players and our respective positions.
For more visuals:
Here’s an approximation of the mid-range distance I tried to get for the first photo. Not right up in their faces, but both nice and visible.
Here’s how small they looked in the shot the woman wanted. Actually this isn’t very accurate–I couldn’t even find a picture of a woman/kid distant enough through Google Images. Which seems indicative that most parents take photos with kids from closer up. (Also, at least in this photo there’s an interesting/noteworthy background.)
Yeah, I’m thinking this is nostalgic thing is the most likely possibility. Although more power to her if this is where the kid was conceived, because as you can see from the image linked above, it’s a pretty open area!
Heh. The explanations are getting more exotic!
I did check the missing kids database online, I admit. No one resembling the little girl as far as I remember her. Not that many babies listed at all, which is good.
That would be awesome. But I’m probably just as bad at distances as I am with ages. I wasn’t close enough to touch them at all, plus I had a camera in both hands, so unless I had a prehensile tongue, there was no way for me to grab at either of them. She didn’t back away or anything as I moved up, and I did say that I was trying to get a better view of the two of them.
(I am so far from threatening in appearance, too. It’d be like being afraid of Mother Goose!)
Also very true. I tend to think of everyone younger being more tech-savvy re: phones than I am, but that isn’t always the case, of course. (For some reason, though I know my way around computers and so on, I find myself ridiculously daunted by smartphones and tablets. I feel as if I’ve absorbed all the tech I can handle, and once I hit 45 my brain just said: okay, that’s all I want to learn now. This far, no further.)
Sure, and the same to you, CairoCarol. Thanks! They’re in the paranormal romantic suspense genre, really, although there’s more suspense than either paranormal or romance to them.
OTOH the site linked in my profile is a free online serial that has plenty of mystery in it, if you want a taste. The first “seasons” are more soapy than the current three–it started out somewhat campy, but took a darker turn as time went on. (And I apologize for the crappy site, I haven’t redone it since 2001 and it’s terribly outdated.)
We’re on the same wavelength–that was my very first guess as well! I figured maybe she’d lost baby weight and wanted a pic. She was mighty slender, so if that’s it, she did a good job!
Crapples! I could’a had an iPhone? I definitely need to think faster on my feet.
It’s definitely a fifty-fifty thing; some people aren’t at all fazed by this, others are. For me, it was just a combo of factors, I guess. Something in the air. Wasn’t helped by the fact that it was a rainy day, so it seems an odd choice to get a photo while standing getting drizzled on. But as I said earlier, there’s likely a mundane explanation.
Yep definitely a possibility too. I mean, to me, she didn’t sound as if she were hyperbolizing, but since I don’t know this woman from Eve, I can hardly claim to be able to judge her tone perfectly!
Good question! Nope, no diaper bag. Just her, the baby and her own over-the-shoulder bag, about the size of a paperback book. She could very well live nearby, though, and wasn’t planning a big trek, just a walk around the block, even in the light rain. The baby had a hood on, so the rain wasn’t a big deal. (Oh I see even sven mentions that possibility too.)
Oh that’s a possibility. I just saw a setup like that on the National Geographic show Brain Games, where they arranged for one woman to distract a man by asking him loud questions in a foreign language, and after the pickpockets grabbed his camera/briefcase, the woman continued to shout at him, making the “victim” (he was part of the experiment too) all confused as to what to pay attention to.
(The experiment was intended to test the witnesses nearby–they were asked to describe exactly what happened, how many people were involved in the ‘crime,’ what the woman was wearing, etc. As usual, everyone got things wrong, showing that people aren’t great eyewitnesses.)
I was after that sweet iPhone, but forgot the part about running off with it.
Oh totally! This is how my hypothetical mystery could start out. The woman turns up dead, and they discover that someone took her picture only an hour earlier–the cops think it might not be a stranger–and fingerprints/DNA point to our heroine.
…Of course, there’s no reason her fingerprints and DNA would be on record, alas. She’d have to be a suspect already for them to match. Gotta work around that plot point!
Thanks, delphica! Your earlier points are good too; maybe if I were a parent, and we could be talking about a single parent too, I wouldn’t have thought much of the incident because I’d know more about the common issues that could crop up. Might also help if I weren’t so wimpy myself, and I don’t think I’ve ever come up to a stranger and asked for a favor (except for directions, probably), so even the common request for someone to take a photo is a bit beyond my ken.
See, now this is the kind of logic I’m looking for! I knew it’d be something down-to-earth like that!
Why is this photo titled “PrisonMeg_Aiden.jpg”?
Did she look at the pictures on the phone before you left? It could simply be that she had no idea how they would turn out, and thought that your intermediate position would actually be a closeup, and thought the distant position would be a nicely framed full body shot.
Looking back at the Google Image search from which I grabbed the link, it appears to be a woman named Meg, and a kid named… well, you figure it out… outside a prison. It’s from a blog. I wish I’d chosen something else, in retrospect, because that randomly picked photo is from a personal essay and now I feel crappy for linking to it.
In fact I’m gonna report this and see if I can get this changed. I’m glad you pointed this out, thank you!
Hmm. Damn, I don’t remember. I think she looked at the second one before she left, but my memory’s foggy and it could just be that it’s what I’d expect her to do. But that’s an interesting point and could be a good answer to the mystery.
I have very few pictures of me and my baby because I generally just don’t like pictures of myself but I feel like I ought to. But I never selfie. Ugh.
