Brillant!  but sad. Is this what London has come to?  jeez,  back in the 90s, I was always roaming around down in the financial city of London, mainly shooting for banks and brokers but also an incredible amount of stock and I NVER, had any problems, the one and only time anybody came up questioning me was once, outside the futures/options exchange, they had differant color jackets and some didnt want to be in the shoot.

Its really sad how an otherwise so free city like London has turned into this. Great stuff, where did you get it or find it?

Interesting clip. Never had any problems myself whilst living/working in London, but that is 5 years ago now. Does seem that the Police have been better briefed now-a-days compared to all the articles in the press just a few years ago. However the private security staff seems hopelessly uneducated in these matters and their attitude is shocking.

Hi there!

London today is the most heavily guarded and secured metropole in the world, cameras everywhere, in every corner. I didnt realize it had come to this though. As far as the security staff?  well, they seem to be just heavies and yes,  uneducated. Just look at the staff, telling the photographer to move one meter out in the road and then suddenly it was alright to take pictures.

The policeman at 12 mins needs some props.
Nicely handled.
ETA: just finished watching actually all the police seem to have been much better trained than in previous videos.
Maybe all the embarrassing youtube videos have had an effect!

Yes, a big improvement on previous films that were going around.  It's good to know the message has reached the police on the beat by now.  Hopefully, in time, the security guards will realise that they are wasting police time by involving them in these cases, and will come to understand the law better as a result.

ETA:  I saw this public demo in the video items to the right of the one mentioned.  Hopefully this helped to change things.

Mass Gathering in defence of street photography Trafalgar Square

Hahah, yes those guards weren't the sharpest knives in the drawer.

Well used to the security, cameras, bombings, crazy rioters, as well as the City of London itself - used work as an investment banker until I got fed up with it all, swapped to photography full-time and moved to rural Scotland.

Scotland!  oh boy , my favourite areas alongside with Cornwall and the Cotswolds. Must have been to Scotland 100 times, fantastic for Photography, the highlands of Scotland is totally unequaled, nothing like it in the world.

If they did nothing wrong, they would have nothing to fear.

Governments, companies, corporations... they should be open to public inspection at any time.

But they have a lot to hide.

The policeman at 12 mins needs some props.
Nicely handled.
ETA: just finished watching actually all the police seem to have been much better trained than in previous videos.
Maybe all the embarrassing youtube videos have had an effect!

Yes I do agree that the Policeman actions in this video do seem reasonable, points out how badly learned the security guards are

The security guy was asking for an ID? Now that's not tolerable. I ran into this when shooting downtown LA, a the security guy took the time come out of the building and walk thru the little park area to harass me. When I was told that part is private area, I moved about ten inches to the pavement, than he said there are laws to prevent people from taking photos of these tall builings since 911, and just stood around looking dumb so I would leave, of course I didn't, nice job at humiliating himself. The funny part is that a member of my family, lawyer, works in the building, that's why he dropped me ther so I could walk around LA photographing. When he came from work I told him the story and he said it's total b***crap, ther are no such laws, I can shoot just about anything in public places, and he suggested thet if get harassad again, I should just call a cop, thats it.

Call the cops on the security guys... lol. And shoot them while they talk to him. Now THAT's is humiliating

The most funny, absurd and sad thing is that the security guards and police seem to harass mostly photographers shooting with big cameras and tripods. If I was going to make some mischievous terror plans I'm sure I would not use big bulky cameras that attract attention: I would use point and shoots and pretend I'm shooting people.

So True. Also I'd believe there's some law preventing the obstruction of passage for other people, by placing a tripod down on a public walkway. Or being a general nuisance. Is rent-a-cop baiting a nuisance activity? Gee wiz, don't most people have cell phones for candid shot activity, not some big-ass camera on a tripod? Stupid!

Most of the US laws that prevent "commercial" shooting without a permit, limit the size of the crew, use of tripods, lighting stands, and other ground equipment, but say nothing about what you may or may not shoot. Locally one of the parks (also domes with flowers and gardens) and the county zoo had so many people coming for wedding shoots that they started issuing permits. It's county owned land and in effect public, but there are regulations when it becomes a problem.

Yes, I've been asked for ID while shooting planes taking off and landing at the airport. Very nice, they just wanted to know who I was.

Any of these people or anyone else, anywhere, that has a camera and not tripod or ground equipment, should be free to shoot as they please. Even if it is staff coming and going from a building. (that one got me laughing) I liked the guy inviting them in to shoot when they said it was for personal use. Rather nice of him.

It's a good point that terrorists are unlikely to be using tripods and big cameras.  They can just use Google street view now   I took photos of the houses of parliament with a cake tin pinhole camera when I was a student in the early 90's, when the IRA were bombing London.  If I was going to do that now, I would let the police know first.  It would look suspicious and could be difficult to explain. 

I took some photos in London recently with no problems but I wasn't using a tripod.  It wouldn't put me off, if you know your rights and carry a list of them with you, there's nothing the rozzers and the security people can do other than make fools of themselves.  I think sometimes the photographers aren't very diplomatic and make a situation that could be easily resolved escalate into something bigger than it should be.  We don't hear about all the police that do their job well, only the ones that are incompetent, heavy handed and don't know peoples rights.  Most of the police I have come across couldn't care less about me taking photos in public places.

Brillant!  but sad. Is this what London has come to?  jeez,  back in the 90s, I was always roaming around down in the financial city of London, mainly shooting for banks and brokers but also an incredible amount of stock and I NVER, had any problems, the one and only time anybody came up questioning me was once, outside the futures/options exchange, they had differant color jackets and some didnt want to be in the shoot.

Its really sad how an otherwise so free city like London has turned into this. Great stuff, where did you get it or find it?

Dear Lagereek
I was just surfing and came across a blog written by a UK based freelance photographer called Philip Wulmoth - I just posted another link today that he was written on the BBC website about the future of freelancing. The blog address I discovered was here:

http://philipwolmuth.blogspot.com/

There's a great wealth of information to be found and the youtube link you reference was buried in here somewhere.

EDIT 16.30. The link was somewhere else, just searched my history. The Youtube clip in the OP was from this site which I got to through the Philip Wolmuth blog.

http://cameraobscura.ro/street-photographers-test-freedom-to-shoot-in-london/

Quote from: cthoman on December 19, 2011, 11:27

Basically, they showed up to cause trouble and harass security, so they could shoot a video about it. Then, when asked by security why they were there, they lied about the reason. Who is acting improperly?  

My thoughts exactly.  All stunts like this are going to accomplish is to piss people off even more.

It looks to me like they're doing us all a favor, by challenging this idiocy and exposing it to public ridicule.  Until someone does that, things will only get worse, as these unintelligent and uninformed "security" people steadily assert more control over what happens in public areas.   An employee of some big corporation has absolutely no business yelling "no picture" - or anything else -  at someone across the street.  

This has nothing to do with security - absolutely nothing.   In fact it's closely related to efforts by big corporations  to extend intellectual property laws beyond reason, asserting ownership of things like shapes and colors - and demanding that ISPs become secret police informers - and intimidating citizens and competitors by unilaterally rewriting the libel laws.

We should be thanking these guys.

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