You could have asked first!

I love to snap strangers, those candid shots of random people, with expressions you can only capture when they have no idea they are being photographed.  But is that being too intrusive?

On a recent day trip with Jess to meet the good folk of Instagramers Brighton, as part of our Instagramers London and Instagramers UK roles, we took a little stroll around the town, as you do!  In the distance I could see a street musician, or busker, and thought he might make a perfect subject.  So, as we approached I took a couple of what I thought were sneaky snaps, until he piped up "You could have asked first".  My immediate reaction was to apologise (after all I had been busted!) and offered to delete the photo from my camera roll.  And the discussion could have been left there, chalked up to experience, and moved on.  But he clearly had a bee in his bonnet about this and was determined to give us his thoughts on the matter.  While our Brightonian host Dave (from Printagram) hovered above his guitar case with some change, our (un)friendly busker continued to tell us that we weren't the first, how fed up he was with people not asking before taking his photo, and that it wasn't about the money, just the principle.  To which our response was that while he is performing in a public space (apparently Brighton has an open policy on street musicians), and clearly looking for an audience, he was bound to attract such attention.  It is not illegal to photograph people in a public space, with the obvious exception of children, and so our discussion went on.  You could argue that we might not like his style of street music but he didn't ask us whether we minded him playing within our earshot!  Anyway, we eventually moved on, considered him a miserable git, and here's the photograph anyway!

And here's some useful reference on photographers rights:
Metropolitan Police
Simon Moran's Photographers Rights Guide V2

Debs
12 February 2013

A fresh look at photo sharing

In my previous post I suggested that none of the alternative photo sharing apps could touch Instagram, and I still believe that.  However....... I have been very intrigued and impressed by Backspaces, a fairly new app that takes the photo sharing concept to a different level, by allowing the user to group their images, text and geotags, and bring it all together before posting as a complete 'story'.  Out of all the photosharing apps I have seen and joined, this one has fired my imagination more than most.

I first signed up about three weeks ago after seeing an Instagram friend's shared post on Twitter.  I found some familiar names to follow and posted a small series of photos as a test run.  Nothing too spectacular there, but this weekend I had a good look around the app and found lots more familiar Instagram names as well as the three developers Dimitri, Adrian and Wylie to follow.  These three guys are great.  They follow, like and comment on many users' stories, are responsive to feedback, reply to comments and seem genuinely blown away by the app's success.  What sets this app apart from Instagram and the other Instagram wannabes, is its ability to draw the reader into an image and the story behind it.  They say a picture speaks a thousand words, but combined, the pictures and the considerably less than a thousand words can convey a real sense of being part of that story.  I've seen snow fall in New York, I've seen a drag artist's transformation, and I've read a moving story of a woman whose mother is transgender. Some have few words and rely on visual impact, while others have a narrative enhanced by the images.  And it works, really well.  It's not trying to compete with Instagram, I don't think it can anyway.  But instead it invites it's fast growing user base to look deeper into the stories behind the images.

Photo Sharing apps - can anyone touch Instagram?

Back in the day before phones were mobile and cameras had a winding mechanism, the main way of sharing photos was by popping the film into the local chemists, picking the prints up a few days later, cursing at the passing stranger who mischieviously stuck two fingers, bunny ear style, behind the head of your subject, and boring your family senseless when you whipped out yet another holiday photo album.  Things have moved on since then, one hopes!

One of the easiest ways to share photos now is to put them online, there are any number of ways of sharing our treasured memories.  It could be Facebook, Flickr, Picasa or any other web based program that allows us to store and share our photographs.  With the relatively recent phenomenom of social media based apps like Instagram, the sharing is pretty instantaneous, it's shared before it's even old enough to be a memory!  Now, I am a bit of an Instagram addict - I discovered it in March 2011, 5 months after it was launched and several million users later, it is still my go to app for photo sharing.  But the recent kerfuffle over the terms and conditions has meant that more than ever previously dedicated users are moving away.  More so than any time before, even after Facebook made millionnaires of its co-founders, when the Android version was launched, or even the uproar over the algorithm change on the popular page!