Hmmm, looking at the original article again:

- which I think is exactly as I suspected/summised.

I think, actually, without seeing the email, it's unclear that he specifically asked to take images of just flowers/plants etc. Although it says "wanted to take pictures of blooms", unless he actually clearly and explicitly specified something like "flowers, plants and bushes with no people in them" then this could include people. "Hello, please can I take pictures in your park" could include people. My experience with requests such as this is that you have to be completely and utterly specific and limiting in order to get permission. In my experience, if you are, and if you stick to it, it's easy.

No, as a parent of young children I'm not at all upset that they refused some unknown guy generic permission to take photographs. At all.

John, I've seen the big AP brooha about photography rights, even had the cleaning cloth. As we're both aware the law has recently changed, thank goodness. Agreed the police, especially the part-timers, are often duffers about it, terrorists really don't have the habit of advertising their targets by turning up with a big lens and camera.

I'm also perfectly aware of particulars and probably have more experience than all of you lot put together with terrorism, as an contributor and ex Deputy Editor of Jane's Intelligence Review, and as a MLitt postgrad of International Security Studies at St.Andrews, with a specialism in International Terrorism, and an MA(Hons) in it too. The dilemma for the liberal state was well illustrated by my old prof, Wilkinson (who authored Terrorism and the Liberal State), so please don't patronise me.

Finally, surely it's an intellectially bad argument to say there's no privacy already and then to illustrate this up by looking up my family details. To explain: by saying "there's no privacy already" and then making it ok, you're saying "hey it's bad already so let's be ok about making it even worse" - intellectually it's a very poor argument to follow.

Anyhow I feel offended by some of the uncivilised responses here, and I must say it screams very much of a herd mentality and response. It's my personal belief that I'd rather be safe than sorry, and whilst not ideal, society generally is better off when it takes this view. I'm terribly sorry that some of you find this so offensive.

-exactly. Flowers, nobody gives a damm, rightfully so.

But the problem with asking for generic permission to photograph in the is that it includes the possibilities of shots of kids etc. And I don't know what the legal position is for the council - if they say fine and the parents say no and then sue, is in fact the council opening itself to legal problems?

So is anyone actually a qualified lawyer here and knows the legalisties of this for a fact - how does this square with the need for model release forms etc, does the one (council) then take precidence over the non-signing of forms?

Seems to work for me, DonaldM

test

They complement each other precisely because they're the two different possible interpretations of the 10-20mm range: fisheye and rectilinear.

That said since I got the 10-20mm the 10-17mm has been gathering dust... just can't live with those distortions now

Hmmm, how much for the grip on its own?

Let's agree to disagree .

I love my piccies and think photography is a great thing, but I'd rather forego this if ever a child is put at risk because of it. Or if ever a bomb is detonated because of this as well. Yes, I rate those higher than every photo I've ever seen.

But, one thing to make clear. My hunch is the council thought he was taking piccies of people, hence refused. They cannot and should not stop people taking piccies of plants etc. That's just daft .

Not really - the council obviously doesn't want men taking piccies of kids in the park, hence the no. Good thing too imo. I'm sure that if he makes it obvious his pics are of flowers they'd say fine.

Coker, one of various things which distinguished AA's work was his mastery of zones. This was a mastery which was throughout his work from camera to darkroom: the resulting prints have a marvellously rich variety of tones with a full tonal range. Screens, especially with their different calibrations, colour temparatures and so on, don't do justice to works which are meant to be seen as the finalised prints, nor do crappily saved JPGs, GIFs or PNGs. His work was good enough compositionally so that they can still look great on screen but the true interpretation of them should be as prints.

Back in the pre-digital manual age, negative, developer, darkroom and printing made a tremendous amount of difference and AA was astounding in his mastery. You are of course quite right that perhaps none of our work shows true either, and I do apologise but somehow I rather doubt that the difference between our work on screen and as printed is as nearly great as the difference on those images on screen (one of which looks very flat I have to say, perhaps the wrong grade of paper) and those images as worked on and printed with proper darkroom technique. No offence but if you havn't seen his work or are not familiar with his classic works (the negative etc) and systems (the zone system) then it's more or less futile trying to explain.