I have had two instances with the police relating to taking pictures in public places. The first was in Scarborough about four years ago where I was taking pictures on the seafront and the beach, it was summer and rather busy. We were there for an hour or two then decided to walk back to the car and leave town.
Unaware to us, someone had followed my wife and I back to the car and on driving out of the town we were stopped by no less then three police vehicles. To cut a long story short they had problems with paedophiles in the town and it was obvious that they were paraniod. The officer looked at my images and said fine you can go, but next time you want to take pictures ask the beach life guards. My response was, but there is no law against taking pictures in public so I don’t need to. No response from the Policeman, I suppose one has to careful.
The second instance was last year in Scotland with Andrew Bailey who wanted to take some shots of the Grangemouth Oil Refinery. An industrial photo, shot at low light with all that heavy metal, steam, lights and gas flames, it looked spectacular. So we were driving on a public road through the refinery where Andrew wanted to be dropped off.
I dropped Andrew off and agreed to pick him up in a while, whilst I was looking elsewhere for photos. On my return he was surrounded by security guards who were waiting for the police to arrive who were expected in the next five minutes.
There was not much else to do, so I left him at the scene of his crime and said I would be back in twenty minutes. When I returned he was still there, no police, we decided not hang around, it cannot be against the law to take pictures from a public road. We checked with the guards that they had no rights to detain us and we left!
That night we stayed in North Berwick, the following morning I phoned home only to find out that my wife had a visit from the police at 1am in the morning. She was waiting up for our daughter and feared the worse when two police officers arrived at the doorstep.
They just wanted to check us out and make sure we were not nutters or terrorists (that was a close shave).
If you want to take pictures in public places just take them, nobody has the right to stop you. On private property that’s different read the other information on the links above.
So you would have thought I would have learnt my lesson when taking pictures in public, or for that matter public conveniences, this picture was taken recently, it was not set up.
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