Picture Taking Etiquette

Okay, I lied. Here's another anecdote from my trip to Europe.

As I was leaving the Louvre, I came upon a lady about to take a picture. She was standing up against the railing, shooting across 30 feet of hallway to a picture on the wall. Hence, she was using up the entire hallway, blocking the only way out of that wing of the Louvre, and expecting a dozen or more people to wait while she took a picture.

Thinking this was morally unreasonable, I did the courageous thing and walked right through her picture. She made some throat noise and clearly felt I was shockingly rude to have done this.

Now, there were numerous things I could pick on about her behavior. For example, she wasn't actually taking a picture of an exhibit. It was just a generic decoration in the entryway. Oh, and she had her 3x zoom on. She could have simply un-zoomed and then gotten out of everyone's way.

However, it occurred to me as I walked away that there is a good technique for sorting out our moral intuitions in this case. I claim that, if it were reasonable to expect people to act in a certain way, then it would at the very least not seem ridiculous to actually ask people to do it.

How does this lady's action hold up under that measure? If she had called out to the dozen or so people, "Everyone wait! I need to take a picture," I think she would seem quite rude. And I do not think that her not actually saying aloud somehow makes this any less rude.

If people do choose to wait while you take a picture, that is very nice of them. But it doesn't seem fair to expect it of them, especially when, as in this case, they have no way to avoid walking in front of you.