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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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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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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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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What can be achieved when you combine thousands of images, tags and photographers? Flickr think they have the answer with their Commons feature. Check out the info over at the Flickr Blog

What if we could lend this wonderful power to some of the huge reference collections around the world? What if you could contribute your own description of a certain photo in, say, the Library of Congress’ vast photographic archive, knowing that it might make the photo you’ve touched a little easier to find for the next person?Well… you can.

Announcing The Commons.

Their first stab at this idea is the library of congress pilot project. While it is early days I think it could be quite an interesting scheme. There is by no means the wow factor of Photosynth, but imagine both working in combination …?

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We have talked about Microsofts super-cool photosynth acquisition before but never seen it demonstrated quite so well as this video from TED

Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation.

I am sure you will agree, it’s the future!

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If you have ever wanted to know more info about your Flickr traffic, who looks at what, and where your views come from, the Flickr has the feature for you!

We’ve designed stats on Flickr to give you all sorts of insight into how people arrive at your photos.

The stats are updated daily and include referrers from other sites and search engines, including search queries, individual photo views within the site, but nicely it does NOT include your own clicks which could skew results.

You need to be a pro user to get this feature, plus after activating you need to wait a while to actually see some statistics.

Visit Flickr now to activate your stats or read more at the FAQ.

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Flickr has now launched the joint-venture photo-editing feature with Picnik. This allows you to do basic tweaks to the pics in your photo stream. While not Photoshop, the ability is welcome, particularly when you have uploaded your pics on the move, for example from your phone camera.

When you first hit the edit button you are asked to allow Picnik into your account.

After that the editing interface should load. On my Macs Firefox it doesn’t, boo! Luckily I also have Safari.

Strangely even in Safari I found I had to click through twice or more to actually get to edit. When it does work though it is a welcome addition!

More info at the Flickr Blog

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