The Nazis of DC

So for my Wedding my wife and I went to take wedding shots at the Washington DC Monuments. We both love DC a great deal, and we thought that I would make for some really great shots. However, you think that you would be able to just walk up and take pictures just like all of the other 9000000 people that are there everyday. NOPE! not true. We learned that you have to have a permit to take professional pictures there. What constitutes as professional? Ones you pay for. Makes me wonder if I had just not paid her if I could have done it for free.

Fortunately for us (us being The Girl and I) we learned that you have to have one of these handy pieces of paper before our wedding day. 100$ dollars later had a one day pass to take pictures. Now there are some more catches to this.

1. you can't just take pictures anywhere. Places like Arlington Cemetery are off limits. Kinda morbid for wedding shots so we were not too sad about that one. Also monuments like the one that you see here. You can only take them on the outside pillars, and you can't be inside them. We did it anyway, but not without getting caught by the Nazis. I'll tell you some more about them in a minute. You also can't get the actual statue of Jefferson in the shots.

There are a whole other slew of rules, and don't worry they give you this nice big packet full of diagrams, and rules for you to follow. This is a Government thing we are talking about here, so it is a lot of them. Also most of them are just kinda dumb.

catch number 2. You must deal with the Monument Nazis. There are these people that roam the monuments looking for wayward, and misguided tourist to whip back into shape. They are the security guards. We learned that there are two kinds of them there. they are:

1. Those that are making sure people stay out of trouble
2. Those that "take the job to seriously" (as quoted by a member of number one)

The people of group number 1 are great. They kindly make sure that we have a permit, some of them just ask and that is enough. They also say nice things, and make sure to let us know that there are people of the sort that fall into the number 2 category.

The people in number two are. . . Nazis. They were so bad that one of them told our photographer that she needs to hold her backpack on her, and that she is not allowed to leave it on the ground. He said an unattended bag is not allowed. So apparently 6 feet away from an open camera bag, while holding a camera aimed at two people is appropriate wedding attire is not enough to dictate that the bag is not "unattended." Then the guy proceeded to watch us, as we so kindly ignored his moronic request.

There were other stories of them such as making sure that we were not standing in the wrong place. One guard yelling to another Giraud to run and check us for permits, and one even tackled me after I dripped some sweat from my brow onto a bench. OK I made up that last one, but it would not have surprised me if it happened.

However even with the DC Nazis it was a great experience. I highly recommend getting wedding shots done at the DC monuments. The tourist are great. They take pictures of you, and I mean it is blatant, like from 4 feet away they are aiming them in your face. My beautiful bride was even filmed for bit. People would honk and yell congratulations from the road, and a tour bus full of people even applauded us! All in all it was great. As soon as I get the pics I will post some of them up for all to see.