I also enjoyed the article and the images in it.
If you are not Asian, be aware that you will stand out in a crowd no matter how discrete you try and be. You're a curiosity, and quite visible, so there's no point in trying to pretend you're a local just out for a walk. Just be who you are – clearly a foreigner with a camera.
This is so true that people have problems understanding it.
Someone (another westerner) mentioned to us while we were in Kathmandu that we should be careful not to walk around with our expensive cameras, because that made us look too much like rich tourists.
Dude, we're between one and two heads higher than everybody else, our skin color is all wrong, and we'd have to walk around for a couple of days just to find the proper clothes for camouflage. And even a poor European student backpacker is rich compared to most of these people. The camera is
not what made us stand out, they had us figured long before that.
And, in my rather brief experience in Nepal, Tibet and Yunnan, Michael is absolutely right about how relatively easy it is to photograph people. They just go about their business.
The one noteable exception I can think of is holy men in Nepal, who expect to be paid for their photographs. Some of them will harass you in an attempt to make you pay them money (taking the photograph is probably optional), and if you don't, they'll use a rather well-known finger gesture (no, not the middle finger one). If my camera hadn't been half-way into the bag already, that would have made for a great picture.
BTW, while I was in Bhaktapur (October 14th), there appeared to be some sort of photographer's workshop, because a bunch of people with semi-professional or professional equipment were wandering about. At least one person had a 1-series Canon, accidentally in the middle of the frame of that picture (I was hurrying to catch the woman in the sari on her way down the stairs):
There's something eerily familiar about that guy, does anybody recognize him (click the image for the option of a larger view)?
