In my professional career I have photographed riots in Miami, the dangerous slums of Cite Soleil and high-profile subjects like Dr. Dre. None of said situations were as nerve-racking as taking this photo of a musclebound man who looked like a marine using his daughter’s Minnie Mouse sunglasses to keep the light out as he slept on a flight home from Disney World where he’d just spent a week with his wife and young daughter. My reasons for being apprehensive were twofold. First, he looked like a pretty fit guy who could easily kick my ass should he wake up to find some unknown photographer trying to take an embarrassing photo of him in his sleep. Second, I’ve known other photographers to have been detained and questioned after taking photos on an airplane due to security concerns and didn’t feel like winding up in the same situation. These are two pretty convincing reasons to stay in your seat and not take the photo. But I just couldn’t resist! It’s not that I wanted to embarrass the guy, but the obvious juxtaposition and the story the photo could tell was too enticing to pass up. Plus, I was pretty sure I’d seen him reading a bible earlier in the flight and took this as a sign of what I hoped would be his forgiving nature. After getting up and getting my camera out of overhead storage I took a seat and figured out my settings. It was an evening flight and was pretty dark in there, but using a flash was out of the question as it would both wake him up and draw the attention of the flight crew. Thanks to the low-light improvements in recent generations of cameras and a fast lens, I figured I’d still be able to get something usable, so I pushed the ISO up to 5000 and opened up my aperture and hoped for the best. I ended up making several attempts, standing up to pop off a couple frames, sitting back down to examine the photos and repeating. They were turning out, but I just wasn’t satisfied and he was just sitting there, practically taunting me to keep shooting. His wife noticed me on the second attempt and smiled. On the third attempt her smile lessened as she warned “He’s gonna kill you.” I was hoping she was exaggerating, but took this as my cue to cut it out, returning to my seat for the final time. After he woke up, I waited for a few moments before I got my nerve up to show him the photo. I was relieved to find that he was both a really nice guy and had a good sense of humor! Which is good, since when he later handed me his card I learned that he was a former member of the Army and a mixed martial arts trainer and could probably crush me with his thumb.
