Notes
Last Saturday was the Mass Photo Gathering in Trafalgar Square organized by the people behind the I'm a Photographer, Not a Terrorist! webpage and Facebook group, see also these BBC and CNN reports. Here in the UK, police have been targeting photographers for a while now using Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 that gives the police the power to stop and search anybody without any reason in designated areas. Last week, the European Court of Human Rights ruled the entire law illegal because it was indiscriminate rather than properly targeted at the threat. Examples include Austrian tourists being asked to delete photos of London buses and stations, and people stopped from shooting public landmarks; even according to UK law the police need a court order to delete photos or stop you from photographing public buildings. To make matters even more fun, the landmarks are, of course, proudly included in Google streetview. :-)
Awareness and resistance against this really grew after some incidents late last year involving an award-winning architecture photographer and journalists from The Guardian and ITN. And this was in the week after the police had been ordered to use a more sensible approach towards photographers and that officers were "confused" over stop and search powers. I'm not good at estimating the number of people in mass gatherings like this, but at the height of the protest, 2/3 of Trafalgar Square was packed with photographers. That's a lot of photographers!
Camera & Exposure Information
| PENTAX K20D | |
| Focal Length: | 50 mm |
| Aperture: | f/2.8 |
| Exposure: | 1/30 sec |
| ISO Speed: | 100 |
Category: [documentary & street.]
Comments
Please leave a comment in any language you like
Your comment will be added to the moderation queue and will appear in a few hours. Sorry about that, I need to keep the spam out somehow.
RSS 2.0 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.