This was first published on reddit as an answer to a prompt by u/GivingItYourAll: "You're the world best photographer. Your secret? You can freeze time. Your last photo brings some suspicion up". It was (very) lightly edited since the first publication.
"'Perfect-timing Bill', that's what they call me. And I seem indeed to have an uncanny ability to get the perfect shots at the perfect moment - my 'jumping people' pictures are always great, I catch the funniest superpositions, my wildlife pictures are gaped at, I have a stockpile of pictures of things that fall, break or explode.
To the people who ask me how I do it, I play the modesty card - 'you know, it's a bit of luck, a fair amount of practice, and for every picture that you see, hundreds don't make the cut.' I'm not lying. I do take a lot of pictures to get the right one. And I suppose it does take a bit of luck and experience to snap my fingers at exactly the right moment to freeze time.
I've been called a cheater, a fraudster, a bad photoshopper. The irony of that is not lost on me. I defeated all the claims, one by one. Some people are still not convinced, but then again, some people are still not convinced we went to the Moon.
The cover of 'best photographer in the world' explains my luxury lifestyle. Obviously, my photography gear is everything money can buy and then some. My house has been sold to me as a 'manor', my garage contains three very shiny red sports cars. I still have a reputation as a philanthropist - it's only natural, after all, to give back to the populations and places that allowed me to take such great pictures.
It took me a surprisingly long time to understand that this gift could be used for other purposes. I can't say that I've never taken the opportunity to unzip the fly of an annoying customer or to check someone's ass without the fear of getting caught. Interacting with frozen people creeps me out, though, so I stopped doing that. It was probably more of an incentive to stop than the fear of getting caught.
Over the years, I improved my technique. I didn't want to get caught, so I went to great lengths to ensure that my freezing the time didn't get detected. The most obvious thing is to come back to the original pose when I am done. The second obvious thing is to never shoot from an impossible angle that the client would have noticed. That's why I like wildlife pictures: an eagle will not be suspiscious at the angle at which you caught its best side view. And if I'm not actually taking pictures, well, I can hide somewhere, or I can pretend to re-tie my shoe, or that sort of things, before I snap my fingers. Small thefts were not really possible: if I steal a handbag in the street, there's a fair chance it's going to be seen. Larger thefts are more profitable and easier, assuming they happen in a place where no-one is actually standing and wondering how the thing they were looking at disappeared in front of their eyes.
What I had never really taken into account, though, was that although human beings would probably not notice the minutiae of my position, the CCTV in front of my targets would. And that eventually someone would make the connection between the multiple occurrences of a guy shifting from a few centimeters in the vicinity of every bank and jewelry shop that had been mysteriously broken in this past decade.
And that's why colleagues caught me, Detective. I don't think I will ever forget the three knocks at my door at 6AM this morning, or the first sentence your constable said to me: 'William Stasis? You're under arrest for multiple counts of burglary and grand theft.' But then again... "
William grinned and snapped his fingers.