Tim Almond

Curly has some great blogging about becoming as suspect at a fun fair after taking some pictures. Austin Mitchell had something similar happen and tabled an Early Day Motion on the subject and the whole thing’s been brought out into the open on the news and the BBC. Ministers have now made a clear statement about public photography, so hopefully the message will filter down. And whilst public photography is legal, it’s entirely reasonable that there are places where someone taking photographs could be reasonably viewed with suspicion (such as sites related to national security).

I think that apart from the general reasons of paranoia, the police are probably adapting to the rise in people, especially serious amateurs, carrying cameras and taking a lot more photos. In the days of film we had to ration ourselves, so would be seen taking photos in particularly historic towns and at well-known monuments. But today, with the much lower cost of digital, amateurs seem to carry them around a lot more. Perhaps the police are seeing a behaviour that they haven’t much seen before of cameras where they weren’t before (and dSLRs are far more prominent), and so find it unusual.

Tags: Photography //