Tourists

"Honey, how was the trip to Cambodia?"
"It was fantastic, the day I arrived I found the perfect table clothes for our kitchen, and I got it down from 2 dollars to a dollar fifty, (proudly) it took me twenty minutes of negotiation!"
"What did you do? Where did you go?"
"Oh, you know, Angkor Wat and all those temples."
"What did you see there?"
"Well, most of time I was staring at the back of my digital camera... here I got some great pictures, do you wanna see?"
"Did you meet any interesting Cambodian people?"
"Not really, they all seem smily and very nice... very poor though."

Taking pictures of the sunset instead of watching it...
Dear Fellow Travelers,
As one of many threatening, obtrusive, photo-snapping tourists, i would like to ask you, don't go to places and immediately take out all your cameras collectively in your group of three, ten, twenty, and shoot the picture of local lives and go. Imagine some other people from other country, ethnicity, culture came visit your daily life and did the same thing, how would that make you feel?
Get to know people, or the scenery before taking pictures, make friends with them with eye contacts and smiles, gesture and hey, they (Cambodian kids in tourist spots) are pretty good at English too. And then, ASK FIRST if you can take a picture or not, and if you have a digital camera, show it to them, they'll love it. they don't have any oppotunity to have their own picture taken and see it. as for me with film camera, I got myself obligated to come back to visit them again when the film is processed and prints are done. giving actrual prints to them, i found, is far better gift than showing the LCD back of little camera.
and mostly, don't we all know that no picture, even the most beautiful ones is never perfect recreation of the reality? and the time you are holding the camera up and watching the back of it, is time away from your precious experience of beautiful reality.