Over the last couple of months I have rented the 24mm TS-E lens and later the 17mm. I've taken pictures in my neighborhood and on the nearby campus. With more people at home these days, I've talked with neighbors more than usual. If anything, people expressed curiosity about how the lens worked or what in particular I'm interested in doing with it. One couple was walking down the other side of the street, and they began asking me more detailed questions about the lens. It turned out that both are engineers and have at least some interest in photography. I asked them where they live, and it turned out they are my new neighbors diagonally across the street.
I did get an interesting question from Eric, the Belgian who lives across the street. With the 24mm I had taken an extended panorama of my house and environs by shifting the lens in every direction at 30º intervals (the stops on its rotation) and stitching 17 or so shots together. I decided to do the same thing with the 17mm for comparison. Eric and their young son were out batting a ball around. He asked me if I was selling my house. He had seen me out shooting the pictures before, and I guess with the tripod both times it looked like I was pretty serious about it. It seemed a reasonable question to me.
I guess there are neighborhoods where people feel more threatened by someone with a camera than with firearms, but this isn't one of them. I'm sure there are nutty people everywhere, though. And I find the deer are threatened by anything you point at them and suddenly duck behind trees if I try to shoot them.
Back in the summer of 1970 I was in graduate school in Dallas, and my class was called off for a Friday morning. I decided to put my new 28mm lens on my camera and take the bus downtown. I enjoyed my day of shooting a wide-angle lens, a new experience for me, limited only by how much film I had taken along. What surprised me was my interaction with people. Nobody acted camera shy. I wasn't particularly trying to shoot people anyhow. I found at least people minded their own business, but some folks really wanted me to photograph them. Maybe because I had serious-looking gear they thought I was a pro doing something in particular. One lovely young lady posed for me beside a fountain. As she was being coy, so was I, and I never got a good shot. A muscular young black guy walked up to me and said, "Take my picture," which I was glad to do. He was disappointed that it wasn't about to appear in the paper or anything. But the picture was good enough that I think I still have an 11" x 14" print somewhere. Photographing people with wide-angle lenses is its own kind of art.