Photographers are Tracking Obama on His Xmas Vacation in Hawaii

(photo courtesy of TMZ.com)

Click HERE to see more pics

(courtesy of washingtonpost.com)

By Philip Rucker

HONOLULU -- More than a dozen photographs of a bathing suit-clad President-elect Barack Obama surfaced online Monday showing the shirtless Chicagoan accompanied by his wife, Michelle, and their two young daughters on the white-sand beach in front of their vacation home.

Reporters, photographers and television camera operators traveling with the Obamas have been banned by the Secret Service from approaching the oceanfront estate in nearby Kailua where the family is vacationing. But an enterprising paparazzi photographer wearing a Hawaiian shirt apparently strolled along the beach, saw the Obamas, took out his long-lens camera and started shooting.

The photographer was less than 200 feet from the Obamas, said Frank Griffin, co-owner of Bauer-Griffin, the California-based paparazzi agency that snapped the shots. But the Secret Service agents guarding the property did not ask the photographer to leave the beach.

"There was tacit approval that he was able to shoot what he could shoot. It's a public beach," Griffin said in a telephone interview Monday with The Washington Post. He declined to identify the photographer, but said he is a contractor who lives in Hawaii and whose family has a house not far from the Obama's vacation property.

"The guy just walked along there. He had a camera in his hand. He wasn't hiding behind the bushes. He took some pictures. Everybody saw him. And then he walked off," Griffin said. "It was as simple as that."

Griffin added that the Secret Service "didn't seem to mind."

"He wasn't hiding behind the trees, he wasn't on a boat and he wasn't doing anything that we are used to doing," Griffin said.

Asked whether the photographs constitute a security breach, Obama spokesman Ben

LaBolt declined to discuss the matter, saying only: "We don't comment on security."

Griffin said the photographs were taken on Sunday, the first full day the Obamas spent in Hawaii. In the pictures, Barack Obama was wearing only a pair of black board shorts. The Bauer-Griffin Web site boasts, "Enjoy our EXCLUSIVE pics of your pec-tacular President-elect."

The shots of Michelle Obama show her wearing a black one-piece bathing suit with a bright-colored beach towel wrapped around her waist. Their daughter, Sasha, 7, was photographed in a blue bikini, her hair in a bun. Several other guests of the family are in the photographs, as well.