It’s that time of year again. A wave of cherry blossoms in the Quad is quickly met by a swarm of loafing revelers breaking out the summer attire — or relative lack thereof, to widespread approval. Then come the cameras. Swarms of random people, many not UW students or faculty, suddenly appear in the Quad, snapping pictures of the trees.

If you have ever been to a tourist hot spot like this, you may have noticed that some people only view attractions through a camera LCD and tend to get in everyone else’s way. Anyone who has ever had a brush with the modern marvel of digital photography knows the feeling of being able to take as many pictures as they want — it’s infinite power.

Naturally, however, we don’t want to get caught in the photographs of strangers. Most people don’t like the idea of their face being visible to some random schmuck with a camera five years down the road. So we dodge and weave and curse under our breath at all the point-and-shooters.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Treating even casual photography as an art form rather than a random exercise in pushing buttons forces you to take your shots more carefully and generally less obtrusively.

Bystanders don’t have to run or dodge to avoid getting caught in an artistically minded photographer’s shot because he or she won’t even raise the camera to take a shot under such suboptimal shooting conditions. Proper photographers watch and wait for the right moment. Even if they are just tourists passing through, they don’t mind lingering a few extra seconds to get a better shot. Courtesy is a pleasant side effect of this patience.

Some might even ask in reference to all casual photography, artistic or otherwise: Why bother? Why take photos of anything that a professional photographer with a top-of-the-line camera has already shot ad nauseam? Why is it that from a mile away from the Empire State Building, you can see dozens of camera flashes going off from the top floors at night? Don’t they know that they can easily Google better photos online?

The motive behind this may simply come down to individualistic vanity, though not of a necessarily bad kind. Taking photos is, in some ways, the opposite of scribbling “Joe was here” on a wall. You are allowing the place you are photographing to leave an imprint on you as you go back through old pictures. In 1909, you left a mark on a place. In 2009, the place leaves a mark on you. Snapping the picture yourself establishes something that you cannot have through someone else’s photo — the ability to claim, “I saw this exact view from this vantage point.”

One can, however, satisfy such self-aggrandizing impulses while being sparing with the shutter. Unless you have an incredibly bad memory, you don’t have to take more than 9,000 photos of any particular subject to jog your memory of a trip years from now. Anyone taking photos ought to spend significantly more time mentally composing and balancing their shot than actually taking it.

A good photographer rarely, if ever, has to stand in the middle of a public path snapping away and making a nuisance of him or herself to get that perfect photo.

Reach columnist Russ Wung at opinion@dailyuw.com.