---
type: Tip
title: Don't point the camera at private moments
description: Harry stops filming — or turns the camera on himself — when the shot would take something from the people in it, and says out loud each time that he could have filmed it and chose not to.
tags: [filming, ethics, respect, privacy]
timestamp: 2026-08-05T19:00:00Z
---

# Don't point the camera at private moments

Harry films almost everything, which is what makes the exceptions worth
recording. The rule he applies is not about permission — in both cases below
nobody stopped him and he says so — but about whether the footage would take
something from the people in frame. When it would, he either lowers the camera
or turns it around.

## How Harry applies it

**He stops.** At the cremation ghats of Pashupatinath in
[Kathmandu](/places/kathmandu.md), he films the open-air cremations from a
distance and explains what is happening. Then he comes back round to find
bodies being prepared with the family present and crying, and doesn't film it.
His reason, given to camera afterwards, is worth quoting in substance: he
probably could have, and it wasn't relevant. Not a rule imposed on him — a
judgement about what the shot was for.

**He turns the camera on himself.** Walking the busiest streets of Lyari in
[Karachi](/places/karachi.md), where a lot of the people around him are women,
he points the lens at his own face and narrates rather than filming the street
— while acknowledging the obvious problem, which is that from a distance it
still looks like he's filming them.

**He also applies it to himself, and inconsistently.** In
[Bethlehem](/places/bethlehem.md) he pays his driver a large sum at the end of a
long day — the driver had tried to refuse and asked only for petrol money — and
says on camera that he deliberately didn't film the handover, because he didn't
want to be filming that. On the same trip he films the whole of a $1,000 shop for
families in a refugee camp. He doesn't explain the difference and it is worth
recording that he doesn't: the rule is a judgement made shot by shot rather than
a policy, and the two decisions land on opposite sides of it.

The same instinct shows up in smaller ways: he declines to go inside a mosque
in a Karachi residential district on the grounds that he'd rather not, and he
asks before filming inside religious buildings rather than after.

## And the reason, which he does eventually give

The paragraph above says he never explains the line he draws around his own
life. **At his brother's wedding in [Barranquilla](/places/barranquilla.md) he
does**, and it is worth having as the nearest thing to a stated policy:
**vlogs and personal life should stay separate.**

He says it twice. Before the ceremony, that he will film some of it because his
brother wants a record but wants to actually be present at it; and afterwards,
that this is why he doesn't normally publish anything like this, and that the
video exists only because so many viewers asked for it. The wedding itself is cut
to a few minutes of a full day.

**It does not resolve the inconsistency, but it renames it.** The line isn't
between other people's private moments and his own — he applies the same
judgement to both — it is between what a video is *for* and what he is simply
living through. The $1,000 shop he filmed and the payment to the driver he
didn't now sit either side of that, and so does an entire wedding.

## Demonstrated in

- [The Worlds Most Unlivable Megacity That Still Works 🇵🇰](/videos/AlsvIjzdKWI.md) —
  filming himself instead of the women of Lyari.
- [Nepalese Girl Shows Me Kathmandu🇳🇵](/videos/CtB_10bPImM.md) — putting the
  camera down at a family's cremation.
- [I got Kicked out of the Golden Temple for this 🇮🇳](/videos/MpZUcxh4q7g.md) —
  swimming in the holy water at [Amritsar](/places/amritsar.md) and saying on
  camera that he will not film the women bathing nearby.
- [Inside the Taliban's Most Notorious City (Afghanistan) 🇦🇫](/videos/gkVBxlH4owk.md) —
  two things he deliberately doesn't shoot in [Kandahar](/places/kandahar.md).
  He pays for every child at a trampoline park to have a turn, asks the owner to
  let the girls on after the boys pushed in front, and then keeps the camera off
  them entirely. He also films none of the military walls and watchtowers, which
  are everywhere and which get you in trouble.
- [48 Hours with West Africa's Most Notorious Warlord 🇱🇷](/videos/MUrLV0JpPbg.md) —
  walking through the drug area of the West Point settlement in
  [Monrovia](/places/monrovia.md), Harry passes teenagers nodding off in the
  street and says on camera that he isn't going to film them: they didn't consent
  to it and it would be harsh. He describes what he saw instead, which is the
  whole of this page in one decision.
- [I investigated illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank 🇵🇸🇮🇱](/videos/y52gSxWP_PM.md) —
  the rule turned on his own generosity rather than on someone else's grief, and
  the one entry where he applies it in one place and not in another.
- [Hiking to a Nudist Beach in Colombia 🇨🇴](/videos/W3IZFKlxjFs.md) — the
  cheapest application of the rule anywhere on this page, and the one furthest
  from vulnerability. Nobody at the nudist beach next to
  [Cabo San Juan](/places/cabo-san-juan.md) is grieving, poor, or in a country
  where being filmed is dangerous; they are lawfully undressed in a public place
  and would have been in shot by default. Harry points the camera at the sea for
  the length of the beach and says why. **It extends the rule past "would this
  take something from someone vulnerable" to "did these people choose a place on
  the assumption of not being filmed"** — and it costs him one pan and a
  sentence of narration.
- [My Brothers Wedding in Colombia 🇨🇴](/videos/OldBGyvMzHM.md) — the rule
  applied to a whole day of his own life, and the one place he says why:
  vlogs and personal life stay separate.