Friday, October 31, 2008

A street photographer

Here's a street photographer who is not afraid to get (really) close. I'd like to learn that.




In related news, in the UK:
"The Home Office has admitted that the police had, at times, acted inappropriately in restricting photography in public places"

... This is the same page, only in a version where I can't copy any text. Does anybody know how they do that? (And how to get around it?) (Funny, I can copy in Firefox, but not in Safari.)
... Nope, I was wrong. I can copy all the text by using command-A. What I can't do is drag over any text to select it. Very odd...

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bruce is a pro, a Magnum photographer. He rejects the notion that people have--or at least deserve--personal space. If and when the meek do inherit the Earth, Bruce will have his camera and flash taken away.

In some mirror-opposite dimension, Bruce would be a landscape photographer. This, in part, to escape the world where people stick their cameras in your face to pay their rent.

It takes all kinds. Yes it does.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Are we to understand that you disapprove of his methods?

Anonymous said...

If somebody approached me like that to take a picture, I would be chasing their ass to break their camera. And I definitely would! Hate photographers that assume you are OK with them taking your picture.

There should be a law governing photographers like that.

Juha Haataja said...

That was really an instructive video. Quite a pro in what he does, surprised almost every time the "victims" by moving in close fast.

Although this is a kind of photography I wouldn't do personally, I must admire his persistence.

He probably angers quite a few people daily, though. I wonder would he be able to live in a small city or a village?

Anonymous said...

It is not for me to approve or disapprove. Typically, I don't shoot people.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

I'm sure Michael Moore is happy to hear that. :-)

I don't often, either. But I'd like to do so more. Some of my best pics in the past have been of people.

Anonymous said...

If somebody approached me like that to take a picture, I would be chasing their ass to break their camera. And I definitely would! Hate photographers that assume you are OK with them taking your picture.

No you wouldn't. People who talk like you are usually giant pussies.

Anonymous said...

I don't often, either. But I'd like to do so more. Some of my best pics in the past have been of people.

Those are very good. I think a dude your size would probably not get hassled too much by getting in someone's face like that.

Anonymous said...

Thing is, this is all in public. There's not much you can say about someone taking pictures in a public place. Chasing after the guy and breaking the camera is going to get you in trouble, nothing more.

Anonymous said...

I remember taking a picture of an office building near London, a few years back, using a Canon Sureshot btw.

When I had it developed I saw, in addition to the building and sundry other people going about their business, the picture of a woman in late middle age whom I hadn't asked is she wanted to be in the picture and didn't look happy about it.

A lesson I never forgot.

No, you should always ask people's permission to photograph them IMO, it's bad manners to do anything else.

Anonymous said...

No, you should always ask people's permission to photograph them IMO, it's bad manners to do anything else.

It might be, in your opinion, but that's all it is - your opinion.

The fact is, it's not illegal to photograph people in public places. Anyone who hassles you for that is the one breaking the law.

This guy doesn't want posed pictures. That's what he'd get if he asked permission.

Anonymous said...

The highlighting denial is done with JavaScript. On the BJP we site with two commands in the body tag:

onselectstart="return false"
ondragstart="return false"

You may have noticed that Snopes.com also does highlight denial, but they achieve a similar result with a dedicated JavaScript script (is that an inelegant redundancy?) I would like to do it on my web site, but first I have to convince somebody that my content is worth stealing.

BJP I expect to be that anal retentive, but Snopes are such nice people to deal with that I hold back my withering scorn for the practice. On the other hand, like buying good quality locks, it ensures that your stuff is only nicked by good quality thieves.

Workarounds: screenshots (remarkably efficient and effective once a routine is established) or view the source code then copy from there (for just a paragraph or two, it is easy to edit out any HTML code). There are ways to defeat the source code method, but like images (and movies) there is no known way to defeat the screen dump method.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

I looked at the source code, it's very complex. But funny enough, just selected All worked, I got the whole page's text.

Then of course I had to cut that down to get the legally and ethically allowed snipped for review purpose. Ironic that they made that harder than just copying everything.

Anonymous said...

I forgot to say that disabling JavaScript in the browser preferences will disable the highlight denial. Doh!