This was really controversial for me. It was the first time someone complained at me for taking a photo. A woman walking towards me (can see her in the green trousers) stopped me and asked if "I had permission to photograph the lady." I responded politely that "I don't need permission as she's in public". The conversation didn't go any where
Her: "Yes you do, and I know about these things as it's part of my job".
Me: "no you don't"
Her: "We you couldn't just take my picture without permission"
Me: "Yes I can, you are in public"
Her: "Well it's rude and disrespectful".
With that she walked off.
Her thoughts aren't too far off an opinion I held, but the truth is all I'm doing is documenting life on the city streets, photographing things that the guidebooks don't show you. My views are changing - if you are in public you don't have a right to privacy. Certainly not in the UK. We are all filmed 24/7 by CCTV, so who's to tell me who or what I can't take photos of. I'm always polite and courteous, but I will continue to stand up to for my rights. Photography is not a crime.
As I left it got me thinking of things I should have said to the lady that came up to me. I should have said thing like:
"I've been documenting the streets of London for 20 years, I know I don't need permission"
"I'm a citizen journalist capturing life on the streets"
"Look up you are on CCTV 24 hours a day
"Did you know some of the greatest and most famous photographs of people in public taken without permission"
Or I should have just taken her photo to capture the altercation and prove a point, but I'm not that kind of person.
Seems I'm pushing the boundaries of my photography an that's a good thing in my mind.
(Footnote I find it controversial as I rarely photograph homeless or beggars, but I liked the juxtaposition between the all the tourists and this beggar, plus the blue caught my eye.
Tags: Controversial Candid E-PL1 Permission PINAC Woman Begger London Blog Blue Millennium Bridge preflickrd
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This was really controversial for me. It was the first time someone complained at me for taking a photo. A woman walking towards me (can see her in the green trousers) stopped me and asked if "I had permission to photograph the lady." I responded politely that "I don't need permission as she's in public". The conversation didn't go any where
Her: "Yes you do, and I know about these things as it's part of my job".
Me: "no you don't"
Her: "We you couldn't just take my picture without permission"
Me: "Yes I can, you are in public"
Her: "Well it's rude and disrespectful".
With that she walked off.
Her thoughts aren't too far off an opinion I held, but the truth is all I'm doing is documenting life on the city streets, photographing things that the guidebooks don't show you. My views are changing - if you are in public you don't have a right to privacy. Certainly not in the UK. We are all filmed 24/7 by CCTV, so who's to tell me who or what I can't take photos of. I'm always polite and courteous, but I will continue to stand up to for my rights. Photography is not a crime.
As I left it got me thinking of things I should have said to the lady that came up to me. I should have said thing like:
"I've been documenting the streets of London for 20 years, I know I don't need permission"
"I'm a citizen journalist capturing life on the streets"
"Look up you are on CCTV 24 hours a day
"Did you know some of the greatest and most famous photographs of people in public taken without permission"
Or I should have just taken her photo to capture the altercation and prove a point, but I'm not that kind of person.
Seems I'm pushing the boundaries of my photography an that's a good thing in my mind.
(Footnote I find it controversial as I rarely photograph homeless or beggars, but I liked the juxtaposition between the all the tourists and this beggar, plus the blue caught my eye.
Tags: Controversial Candid E-PL1 Permission PINAC Woman Begger London Blog Blue Millennium Bridge preflickrd
© All Rights Reserved
I'm considering using Flickr for my main 'Blogging Platform". What do I mean by that, I mean writing my thoughts into the description of images and putting them into a photo set. This could be a pretty cool and unique way of journalling. Here's a few reason's why I think it's neat.
1. I'm always on flickr as I have a goal of publishing 1M photos in my lifetime (sure not all of them will be good) so as I'm always on the site it should be easy to update stuff.
2. I'm paying for this platform, so may as well maximise it's benefits.
3. I really like the tagging and organisation features, so anything I write can be easily found.
4. It's another creative outlet for me. I really need to always be creating stuff. I don't watch TV - I like Experimenting
5. The privacy factor of Flickr is really powerful. I can set some writing to private if I want to.
6. It's pretty easy to embed other images and such into the comments or description of each blog post. Which is pretty neat.
7. I sort of do this through albums anyway, but this will be a way to post longer form content to look back on. Should make for quite good memories.
8. Cross linking around the site to there images and articles will be kind of neat.
9. It will find another use for my images
10. It's kind of hipster to do this.
Here's a couple of reservations:
1. I don't want all of the text above to clutter with my ability to search my content. For example if I write something on "food", maybe I don't want this to appear in my search results (Or maybe I do!?) Who know's I'll figure that out as I go along. Maybe I could write in the comment section, I don't think that is picked up in the image search.
2. Flickr isn't designed for this type of blogging. I have no idea of the limitations on the platform for this (word count) or even if this is permitted in the terms - I don't see why not though.
So there we have it. I'm going to have a go at blogging on Flickr. Haha! I might even go back and post some of my older blog posts up here. A final thought that occurred to me is that I'm saving this text in the tag field of the photo. That's a pretty covert way of making notes on my work laptop. I doubt anyone would know how to find that. Pretty neat and pretty James bond. Could start keeping a WIki here and adding more notes to say a picture of something I own (Car MOTs) Notes on a person etc.
Cheers and all the best
Tags: Blog preflickrd
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It's ridiculous that all these fabulous photographers are largely constrained to a platform that has a max resolution of 2048px. Not to mention no fullscreen view. In an era of beautiful screens and devices it saddens me a little that we are reducing incredible pieces of art to so few pixels. Landscape shots especially suffer. I removed instagram from my life around two months ago and It's freed me to be more creative. I find inspiration in other places - instagram isn't the only place for photos on the web.
^ My comment on Sean Tucker's youtube video
Video here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUfvHioNs_A
Tags: Blog preflickrd
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Tags: preflickrd
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