Rob, the question was would you carry on regardless, believing what you are doing is not right? Not, would you carry on regardless, believing you might be caught and deserve to have the shit kicked out of you?
I doubt it, bringing it down to that moment.
I'll give you an example: we were on Rhodes, shooting a Tennent's Lager calendar and had gone down to Lindos a couple of times. On one of those days, we were shooting, on and off, right at the edge of the sea, and got into conversation with the late Reginald Bosanquet who was there with a black friend as well as another tv news man and his wife, whose names escapes me as I write. During the chat, he grabbed a can ring and put it on my wife's finger and told her they were engaged. She laughed. Anyway, we went up to the restaurant to get something to eat because the sun was too high and there was no point wasting film. Whilst there, we noticed Reggie, still at the water's edge, surrounded by a bevy of young, topless girls, having what looked like a perfectly innocent fan session. Our model got all excited and said, look! look! get the picture, the
Sun will pay you a fortune (she was one of their models-of-the-year a couple of times), but I said no, let him be; he's on holiday, give him a break. Was that the real me? Probably; to the amazement of almost everyone I knew in those days, I was never money-driven, which was just a bit of good luck on my part, not that I had no need for it. I rather follow my love than my greed.
I hope this answers your question more fully, Keith; it's impossible to tell, with total belief, what might happen until the moment is upon us.
On the other hand, I have made pix of strangers just because they make a perfect illustration to some theme that they cause to spring into my mind. If I can find it, this was one such:
Going all technical: it was probably the D200, but certainly on Matrix metering with, I think, the old manual 1.8/50 Nikkor or the equally manual 2/35 Nikkor, which tells me that five years ago I could still focus manually, five years made one helluva difference, I'm afraid. That said, I must pull out the 35mm again and see how manual works post cataracts. It did take a massive adjustment of the diopter wheel to get to a good point again last week, but as I had the auto 50mm on the camera, that was no focussing test, just a test of seeing the image in the finder!