San Francisco Bush Man

It is illegal to take pictures of the Bush Man without paying up. Or is it?
I use to like this guy and felt that he brought a bit of entertainment to Fisherman's Warf. I went to San Fran with a buddy that I met from Flickr and on the drive over I even asked him about the Bush Man and thought that it would be a good Photo Op to get a sequence of him scaring the tourists.
A little info here....the Bush Man sits on a box and hides behind some twigs/branches/bushes and when people get near he shakes them and scares them. It is actually pretty funny.
I have nothing against giving these street entertainers a buck or 2 and usually ask them if I can take their picture. I wasn't really interested in getting his picture but more getting a series of shots of the people getting scared. In order to do this we were on the other side of the street. This was also done so as to not tip off any unsuspecting tourists about the Bush Man in hiding.
He saw me (and a few other people) standing on the other side of the street and started yelling out that if we were going to take pictures that it was going to cost and that we should pay up. This was on the other side of a busy street (The Embarcadero) which I was not going to cross just to give him a buck and especially when he was demanding it. He was fairly aggressive in his assertion that we should/would pay and I yelled back at him with a question “are you paying taxes on that money?” This infuriated him and he got off his box and crossed over the street walking towards me. I put my camera behind my back (to protect it) and stood my ground as he got in my face and called me a “cheep MF”. I told him to walk off and he then wanted to know if I was going to make him. This went on for a bit and then I thought to myself that this would actually be a great Photo Op so I took a couple of pictures of him and told him that these were going on the internet with a story of what happened. This was very effective in making him leave.
The way that he was acting was as if we were doing something illegal by taking pictures of him.
I found all of this very entertaining and I am sure that many of the tourists that gathered also felt the same way.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Famous_Bushman

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/03/24/BAG5S5Q3251.DTL

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cbBdydQlrk