Boing Boing reports of another unfortunate photographer having to give up because of the war on public photography:

A Gloucester bus-spotter (”omnibologist”) is being forced to abandon his 40-year-old hobby of snapping pictures of busses and trams because security kooks keep calling him a terrorist and even a pedophile.

The sad thing is none of us should be surprised any longer. More from Yahoo! News UK

His love affair with buses has seen him touring former Eastern Bloc countries - but only in the UK has he been accused of doing anything dubious.

Last September in Pontypridd, Wales, a bus driver took exception to being caught in shot and called the police, who demanded to see what Mr McCaffrey had on film.

Later, in Monmouth, a Police Community Support Officers approached him and ran his name and address through the police database, after a member of the public became suspicious.

…

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Canon 1000D / XS is here, no rumors! Canon has announced their new entry-level budget DSLR and what a beast it is.

• 10mp
• Cleaning system
• 3fps
• 7 point AF
• 2.5″ LCD with Live View
• SD card slot

That’s a pretty good bundle for the entry model I am sure you will agree. No news on UK price but expect it to be less than the current 450D and competitive with the Nikon and Sony offerings.

Get more facts at the official site.

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Regardless of the law, it seems more and more photographers and film makers are going to get stopped and hassled for photography in public places. Check out this excellent video.

You Can’t Picture This // Current

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Sunsets are a cliche, yes, but not when they are snapped … on Mars …

View more fantastic space photographs from the NASA archives and their “image of the day” here.

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Damian might want to swap his Sigma 500mm for something more inconspicuous. It seems law enforcement around the world are on the lookout for anyone taking photographs.

Tourist or Terrorist?

Many would assume the men are tourists taking in the city’s sights, but law enforcement officials say they could be terrorists staking out possible targets.

The scenarios were described at an anti-terrorism town hall meeting last week hosted by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office. The meeting, held at Cordova’s First Assembly of God Church, was one of four public meetings that occurred in conjunction with Operation Sudden Impact, a new local anti-terrorism initiative.

“You may think a guy is just shooting pictures, but if you report it to us, we’ll send it on to the FBI and they may have four or five other reports of the same thing,” said Richard Pillsbury with the Tennessee Fusion Center, a collaboration between the Department of Safety and the Department of Homeland Security.

Is it just me or is this asking for trouble? Rather than working on reports of actual suspicious activity (setting off alarms is mentioned later, surely that is a bigger sign?), they will be inundated with calls about families snapping vacation shots?

More worrying, with the “war on fluids”, can you imagine what might happen if you are spotted with a DSLR and are supping from a liquid container greater than 20ml?

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Street photography is safe and legal in a public, outdoor space in the UK, right? Right? Um … check out this tale of brave and intelligent security guarding on Flickr

Two security guards from the nearby shopping center THE MALL came running over, we were surrounded by six hostile and aggressive security guards. They then said photographing shops was illegal and this was private land. I was angry at being grabbed by this man so i pushed him away, one of the men wearing a BARGAIN MADNESS shirt twisted my arm violently behind my back, i winced in pain and could hardly breathe in agony.
A policewomen was radioed and came over to question the two suspects ( the total detaining us had risen to seven, a large crowd had now gathered)

I for one am proud of our brave security goons officers for their ignorance vigilance in abusing protecting our citizens from the horrors of photography.

Read the full horror on the flickr page, and see what one of these asshat security dudes looks like.

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/Film has an article on some clever reality-Star Wars mashup photographs that look really cool, in an extremely geeky way!

French photographer Cedric Delsaux has created a series of photos where he puts Star Wars characters and vehicles and transplants them into modern day urban locations.

I quite like the idea of Jabba and Mr Fett stalking around abandoned warehouses and concrete car parks. Great concept and nicely implemented.

See Cedric’s full collection at his official website.

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According to TechCrunch a version of Picasa for Apple Macs will be coming along later:

I managed to pick the Google employee with the least amount of media training and immediately put her on the spot. Her response: Picasa for Mac is under-development and will be launched later this year.

This is great news, one of the applications I miss from the PC is Picasa. I had really gotten into the workflow and nothing I have found since works the same way. While iPhoto and Aperture are well loved by many, and I have Photoshop Elements which kinda does the job, Picasa was what I had gotten used to.

And it is free, which shouldn’t be overlooked!

You might say I am looking forward to this. Let’s hope they do a good job integrating into the mac experience rather than just port over a subset of the functionality.

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Viewfinder is a project from the University of Southern California that promises to allow you to see your pictures in context within a 3D Google Earth scene. It’s not ready to try out but the demos are very impressive.

Here is what they say about it:

“Viewfinder” is a novel method for users to spatially situate, or “find the pose,” of their photographs, and then to view these photographs, along with others, as perfectly aligned overlays in a 3D world model such as Google Earth

That doesn’t really make much sense until you watch the video and then it becomes much more exciting!

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A while ago I wrote some PHP code to download your Flickr photograph sets using the Flickr API and the PHPFlickr wrapper. Since the Microsoft Yahoo! takeover rumors there has been renewed interest in the code as people want to protect their picture libraries in case they need to bail on their Flickr accounts.

Unfortunately in the time since I wrote it there have been changes that broke my code. This morning I spent some time bringing it up to date. Mostly the problem was around Flickr not returning the original sized image in the same way they used to, and it refused to work even with the most recent PHPFlickr update. It looks like I managed to sort that but it is slower than it used to be. I have a folder full of pictures anyway!

Right now it will only download one set that you specify in the code. While this sounds like a poor limitation, remember you can create a set containing every photograph you ever uploaded if you wanted. Having it download one set allows you to download into neatly organized folders and not spend a month wondering if it is working or not. You can alter the code quite easily if this is not what you need

I updated the original post rather than submit the code as a new article in case anyone had the old version bookmarked. Let me know how it works out for you but I am sure you understand I can’t offer any support.

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