Centre of attention

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This article was published 11/08/2018 (2895 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s arguably the easiest way to become famous in today’s social-media world.

What we’re talking about is the fine art of photobombing, wherein someone — or something — unexpectedly appears in a camera’s field of view just as a picture is being taken, typically as a prank or practical joke.

The photo with the unexpected guest then gets posted online, turning the photobomber into a viral sensation, even if they don’t happen to be human.

For instance, Fiona, an adorable baby hippo at the Cincinnati Zoo, captured the world’s attention last year when she photobombed the moment Nick Kelbe dropped to his knee to propose to his girlfriend, Hayley Roll.

“Nick, my boyfriend, and I were waiting in line to get our photo taken with Fiona and I gave my cellphone to someone to take the photo and when I turned back around, Nick was on one knee proposing,” recalled Roll, who posted photos to Instagram of Fiona with her wrinkly face pressed up against the glass of Hippo Cove.

And Boone, a six-year-old Labrador retriever, has been driving the internet wild since he hilariously photobombed the wedding vows of his owners, Angie Blumberg and Jayce Conway, last month in Big Sky, Mont.

As the couple held hands for the opening prayer, Boone enthusiastically rolled around at their feet with his mouth wide open, leading to insanely cute photos that took Twitter by storm.

It’s a great way to get your mugshot seen by millions of social-media fans, as we see from today’s photogenic list of Five Famous Photobombers, Human and Otherwise:

 

5) The photobomber: A cat named Lisio

https://youtu.be/JtB7qwhPhhg

The bombed photo: As we have already seen, you don’t have to be human to steal the show.

That’s precisely what happened earlier this year when Polish historian, political scientist and activist Jerzy Targalski attempted to make a serious appearance on a Dutch news program. There was the bespectacled Targalski, sitting in his home office, speaking with a journalist from the Dutch public television station Niewusuur, trying to weigh in on the controversial forced removal of Polish top judge Malgorzata Gersdof by the country’s ruling conservative party, when, suddenly and without warning, his ginger cat, Lisio, photobombed the interview.

Partway through the taping, the orange tabby, totally uninterested in whatever its owner was trying to say on TV, began pawing and mewing at Targalski’s right side, then scaled up the professor’s arm as if it was a scratching post. “Eh — we tolerate this?” Targalski sighed, before bravely soldiering on, with a straight face, to talk about the presence of secret-police agents in certain countries and what it all means for the political transformation of those countries.

“But he may as well not have been speaking at all for all the attention his cat was stealing,” noted a report on stuff.co.nz. As the professor bravely continued the interview, the oblivious cat nuzzled his ear, used his shoulders to get a closer look at a chandelier over their heads and curled its tail across Targalski’s face, covering his eyes.

“The political scientist, who earned his doctorate with a thesis entitled Mechanisms of dismantling communism in Yugoslavia on the example of Slovenia and Serbia (1986-1991), simply brushed the cat’s tail away and held it down for several moments to the side of his head,” the website noted. As avclub.com, which posted the video, pointed out: “Part of the joy of living with cats is their refusal to take seriously any issue unrelated to their food, water, litter box, and need for human attention.”

 

4) The photobomber: Tom Hanks

The bombed photo(s): It was a lovely September day in 2016 and newlyweds Elisabeth and Ryan were happily posing for their wedding photos in New York’s Central Park when an unexpected visitor came jogging by.

The jogger spotted the happy couple, resplendent in white gown and tuxedo, and started to slow down. According to a gaggle of news reports at the time, the mystery man leaned in close, took off his hat and sunglasses and chirped: “Hi, I’m Tom Hanks.”

Yes, it was THAT Tom Hanks, the Oscar-winning superstar of such films as Forrest Gump, Philadelphia and Apollo 13. The legendary actor, dressed in shorts and a hoodie, was out for a casual jog when he decided to introduce himself to the bride and groom and photobomb their wedding photos.

Hanks posted his selfie of the moment on Twitter, sharing it with more than 12 million followers and offering “congrats and blessings” to the couple.

Elizabeth and Ryan! Congrats and blessings! Hanx. pic.twitter.com/Uy2GIqYphU

— Tom Hanks (@tomhanks) September 24, 2016

The star-struck newlyweds then invited Hanks to take a few pictures with them, and their wedding photographer, Meg Miller, later posted the hilarious shots to her Instagram page, where they melted the internet with millions of views.

In the shots, the formally dressed couple initially encounter the Oscar winner, with the groom shaking the star’s hand while the bride sports an expression of shock and awe. In the next shot, Hanks poses in between the groom and bride, while, in the third shot, the chivalrous Hanks bends down to kiss the bride on her hand as the groom beams.

“A man tapped us on the shoulder and introduced himself as Tom Hanks. It was pretty surreal. I didn’t register for a split second. I was shell-shocked,” groom Ryan told the BBC while honeymooning in Hawaii.

“He was so nice and kind. He could have just kept running but he posed for photos with us and my family. We invited him to the reception but he couldn’t make it. He actually offered to perform our ceremony as he’s ordained, but we’d only just taken our vows. Maybe he can help us renew them one day. We didn’t realize how much was circulating about us until we landed here.”

It’s like we always say, Ryan: life is like a box of chocolates…

 

3) The photobomber: U.S. tourist Paul Cole

The bombed photo: It’s being called the “greatest photobomb” in history, and chances are most of you reading today’s newspaper have seen it more than once.

We’re talking here about the cover art for Abbey Road, the 11th studio album by the greatest band of all time, the Beatles. The iconic cover features a photograph of the Beatles on a zebra crossing — yes, a crosswalk — outside EMI Studios in Abbey Road and was taken on Aug. 8, 1969. In the photo, the group is strolling across the street single file from left to right, with John Lennon leading, followed by Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney (who is famously barefoot) and George Harrison.

On the left side of the crossing, a white Volkswagen Beetle is parked, while on the right, in the shadows, a mystery man stands at the side of the road. In confirming the identity of the mystery man earlier this year, Britain’s Daily Mirror chirped: “The Beatles’ famous Abbey Road album cover features probably the greatest photobomb of all time — and it was a complete accident.”

It turns out the mystery man, sporting a brown jacket and white shirt, was an American tourist named Paul Cole, who was standing waiting for his wife when the famous photo was snapped. Before he died in 2008, Cole told the Mirror, “(I told my wife) ‘I’ve seen enough museums. I’ll just stay out here and see what’s going on outside.’”

Which is when he spotted four men striding across the road. “I just happened to look up, and I saw those guys walking across the street like a line of ducks. A bunch of kooks, I called them, because they were rather radical-looking at that time. You didn’t walk around in London barefoot,” he said.

When the album came out, Cole was shocked to see himself on the cover. “I saw the album and I recognized myself right away,” he told the Mirror. “I had a new sports jacket on and I’d just bought new shell-rimmed glasses. I said to my children, ‘Get a magnifying glass out and you’ll see me.’” It’s not the cover of the Rolling Stone, but hey, who are we to quibble.

 

2) The photobomber: A Canadian ground squirrel

The bombed photo: You don’t have to be Tom Hanks to become a world-famous photobomber. In one of the most famous photobombings in history, a scene-stealing squirrel went viral after stealing the spotlight in a tourist’s photo in Banff National Park.

It was May 2009 and a pair of tourists from Minnesota, Melissa Brandts and her husband Jackson, had set up their camera on a tripod to capture some photos in front of Banff’s picturesque Lake Minnewanka. The couple were posing on some rocks and poised to capture the moment with their camera’s remote-control shutter when they were famously photobombed by a curious local ground squirrel.

“We had our camera set up on some rocks and were getting ready to take the picture when this curious little ground squirrel appeared, became intrigued with the sound of the focusing camera and popped right into our shot!” Melissa wrote at the time.

The squirrel stood up right in front of the lens, and became the focus of the photo, while the tourists faded into the background.

“A once in a lifetime moment! We were laughing about this little guy for days!” Melissa wrote.

As you are already aware, a star was born. The Brandts submitted their photo to a National Geographic contest and the magazine posted it to an online gallery, where, in less than a week, the little guy dubbed Crasher Squirrel, became an internet meme, with social-media users adding the little scene-stealer to family portraits, famous paintings, and even the top of the Queen’s hat with a pile of nuts.

Crasher Squirrel, who was given his own Twitter and Facebook accounts, quickly boosted Banff tourism. “The Canadian tourism industry as a whole has certainly been facing unprecedented challenges so the welcome addition of the… ground squirrel as Banff ambassador is good news,” Julie Canning, president and CEO of Banff Lake Louise Tourism, told the CBC.

You can even download a “Squirrelizer” app to your iPhone. Which sounds a little nutty to us.

 

1) The photobomber: Bill Murray

The bombed photo: There is only one King of the Photobombers and his name is… no, we were not just about to say Justin Trudeau. Our PM has been involved in some famous photobombs, but many of those were shot by his own personal photographer.

What we were going to say is comedian/actor Bill Murray is the one and only king, because he has been delighting the internet for years. One of our favourite tales occurred in June 2014 when Erik Rogers and Ashley Donald were having their engagement photos shot in downtown Charleston, S.C., when along stumbled the fun-loving Ghostbusters and Caddyshack actor.

Photographer Raheel Gauba had set the couple up on a staircase and was preparing the shot when… OK, here’s what he had to say: “I set the couple down on that little staircase to get ready for a shot and I hear people talking in the back and as I’m looking through the lens, the couple seems stunned and distracted… I think to myself, ‘Oh great, someone is bothering them.’ I turn around and I see Mr. Murray standing there with his shirt pulled up and belly proudly on display which he is patting pretty loudly in an attempt to make the couple laugh.

Needless to say I was stunned and I invited Mr. Murray to join the couple for a quick shot. He obliged and congratulated them and went on his way… leaving behind an extremely happy couple and this photo that will be forever remembered.”

The photos went viral, as did the pictures taken when Murray crashed a bachelor party in Charleston earlier that year and gave the boys this speech: “You know how they say funerals aren’t for the dead but for the living? Bachelor parties are not for the groom, they are for (the other guys). So, I’m going to give you all advice, because it’s too late for this one. If you have someone you think is the one, don’t just sort of think in your ordinary mind, think ‘Okay, let’s make a date, let’s plan this and make a party and get married.’ Take that person and travel around the world. Buy a plane ticket for the two of you to travel all around the world and go to places that are hard to go to and hard to get out of. If when you come back to JFK (airport), when you land in JFK and you are still in love with that person, get married at the airport!”

All hail the king!

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca