Computer security expert Bruce Schneier makes a good case against the authorities harassing photographers for fear that they might be collecting images in order to plan terrorist attacks.

What is it with photographers these days? Are they really all terrorists, or does everyone just think they are?

Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We’ve been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.

Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren’t being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn’t known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about — the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 — no photography.

Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?

Because it’s a movie-plot threat.

A movie-plot threat is a specific threat, vivid in our minds like the plot of a movie. You remember them from the months after the 9/11 attacks: anthrax spread from crop dusters, a contaminated milk supply, terrorist scuba divers armed with almanacs. Our imaginations run wild with detailed and specific threats, from the news, and from actual movies and television shows. These movie plots resonate in our minds and in the minds of others we talk to. And many of us get scared.

Terrorists taking pictures is a quintessential detail in any good movie. Of course it makes sense that terrorists will take pictures of their targets. They have to do reconnaissance, don’t they? We need 45 minutes of television action before the actual terrorist attack—90 minutes if it’s a movie—and a photography scene is just perfect. It’s our movie-plot terrorists that are photographers, even if the real-world ones are not.

The problem with movie-plot security is it only works if we guess the plot correctly. If we spend a zillion dollars defending Wimbledon and terrorists blow up a different sporting event, that’s money wasted. If we post guards all over the Underground and terrorists bomb a crowded shopping area, that’s also a waste. If we teach everyone to be alert for photographers, and terrorists don’t take photographs, we’ve wasted money and effort, and taught people to fear something they shouldn’t.

The New York Times has a report on and a shocking gallery of photos taken by a photographer who was shooting a wedding in the affected region of the country when the recent earthquake struck China.

Together with her flatmate, my friend Hot Wheels Helena has started a blog about her allotment. Coincidentally, after I demanded photos of said allotment in the comments of her first post, I stumbled upon a link to this article about how to photograph vegetable gardens on Lifehacker.

Over on my other blog, I’ve been writing about The Amateurs [aka The Moguls]. The film stars Jeff Bridges. He has an excellent personal Website. Bridges is a keen photographer himself and you can see some shots of rehearsals for that film taken by him with an ultra-wide-angle camera.

You can see more lovely examples of the effects possible with this hardware at the sadly defunct Widelux Blog.

The bride-and-groom’s first dance is a sweet wedding tradition, but one that often makes one or both of the participants nervous. Not only is it another moment on the day when everyone they know is staring at them, but it’s one when they’re expected to put on performance. Despite this, some brave souls really do stage a show.

One of the most moving things I’ve ever seen at a wedding was a groom, who wasn’t a guitarist or a singer, get up on stage with the hired band, pick a guitar, and perform the entire first verse of Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars for his bride, who was standing on the dancefloor watching. He’d obviously been rehearsing in secret for weeks—and it was worth every minute of his sweat and terror. Of course the band then kicked in and he joined her in their first dance.

Thanks to the global reach of wedding videographers and YouTube, you can check out lots of interesting wedding happenings, but first dances are a popular source of entertainment so you’ve probably seen several of these fun variations on the theme. Given the age of couples getting married these days, Michael Jackson is a popular soundtrack, especially Thriller, of which you can find several performances of the moves from its original video, usually involving a fair number of the guests. Norm and Renee, however, segue from politely dancing to Jack Johnson into their own slick self-choreographed interpretation of The Way You Make Me Feel. Similarly, Dave and Anna kick into Boyz II Men at 1:45, these guys mix Johann Strauss and Afrika Bambaataa, and this inspired wig-out [also here] is probably one of the most famous wedding dance on the Web, for now.

Matthew Pillsbury is a US art photographer who uses an 8×10 film camera to take long black-and-white exposures of rooms where people “watch” television. The results on display at the M + B Gallery Website are beautiful and eerie.

Wayne Mackeson takes lovely black-and-white portraits. I could blog so many of his images, but have chosen to embed just this one—”Tío Carli and his Mother”—not because it’s his best, but because it’s both naturally warm and neatly composed.

Tío Carli and his Mother

Originally uploaded by Mackeson ap Meugan

It’s up to you as well as your photographer if you want to look great in your wedding album. My top tip for brides is to make sure you have any rebellious ringlets pinned firmly away from your eyes before you walk down the aisle. I’m not going to stop you and your dad to hold stray bangs back for you.

If you want more advice, then hop over to wikiHow, where there’s a whole page on how to be photogenic.

Back in September, Panasonic invited me to an event at the Tower of London where they presented their new digital SLR camera to photographers, enthusiasts, and the media. Full disclosure:

1. in return for my attendance they gave me a free point-and-shoot digital and
2. I’m not a digital camera expert.

Perhaps Panasonic hoped to convert me from film.

Whatever their reasons, I think Panasonic are doing the Right Thing. I have seriously thought about buying one of their digital point-and-shoots with anti-shake, but theirs is not a big name with the professional photographers, despite the carefully cultivated connection with Leica. (The question of whether or not most professional photographers consider Leicas serious working tools is one I’m not going to get into here.) Getting a bunch of smudgers together in a room and giving them the chance to try out new toys and get over their (possibly macho) suspicions of a company with a reputation for producing nice consumer hardware is smart.

Panasonic’s online outreach extends much further than just inviting bloggers to munch canapés and hear their spiel. They have started a free (and non-proprietary) UK landscape photography Website with competitions and rating systems and other interactive shininess. This is, in turn, part of their wider support for the Our Place UNESCO World Heritage site project. Images from this latter project were shown during one of the talks to demonstrate the landscape capabilities of Panasonic cameras, but something seemed to have gone wrong somewhere between exposure and display because, although they had clearly been taken by skilled pros, they weren’t reproduced too well. (The irony of this will be clear when I review the FX-33 below.)

Panasonic had invited a range of enthusiasts to fill the the audience too. It was interesting that one of the dedicated tech writers (possibly the guy from CNET) left long before the end, even though the event was well organized and informative, and the picturesque setting, the Tower of London, was well chosen for photography. We were introduced to personnel from Panasonic, including personnel from HQ in Japan. And the presentations took place in front of a gloriously bright and clear Pansonic TV. In this respect Panasonic’s range of consumer hardware turned out to be a strength. You can take a memory card from any current Panasonic camera and plug it into a current Panasonic TV and watch your own photos. They were, of course, keen to point out that they have been making camera hardware for years. One surprising statistic they offered is that Panasonic make more camera flashguns than any of their competitors.

Unfortunately, when we released into the natural sunshine later, armed with actual L10s, we weren’t able to fully explore the potential of their new digital SLR or publish the results freely without qualification. This was understandable, given that the model was still undergoing revision and we probably didn’t have enough time to get to know it well enough to get the best out of it, but it makes writing this post hard. Over at Photography Blog they’ve been naughty and published some pre-production shots from the same event.

All I can say is that the L10 felt reasonably well built—perhaps sturdier than a Sony Alpha-100, but nothing like as substantial as an old film Minolta Dynax 7 or Dynax 9—that it was nicely and sensibly laid out, that I almost came to appreciate the live preview and fold-out screen (but of course found myself using the viewfinder because that’s natural for me), and that it was loaded with lots of features, many of which I could see myself using. I was particularly amused to note that the L10 has a “film” button which could be engaged to produce effects at the time of exposure (rather than later with Photoshop), including black-and-white, colour saturated, and retro looks.

My main disappointment was that the sensor is not a full-frame, so wouldn’t offer me the same lens and aperture physics that I rely on to get the effects I want with film SLRs. I do my job before I press the shutter, not later, opening Photoshop. The L10 does, however, conform to the four-thirds standard which I guess makes it compatible with lenses from other manufacturers in this consortium. The big boys at Digital Photography Review have a fuller preview of the L10.

Although I haven’t used it much, preferring a cheap film SLR of course, I have to say that the FX-33 is a marvellous gadget. Features like its face detection, that identifies and focuses on people in a scene, and Intelligent Auto, that decides which of the camera’s many modes to apply in a given situation make getting consistently good results easy. To my amazement, it plugged into one of my Linux (Ubuntu) PCs to transfer images via USB cable without a hitch. ePHOTOzine has more details. One of the most impressive demonstrations of the Lumix point-and-shoot range I saw was when one of the speakers, not himself a photographer, connected a similar camera to that TV monitor I referred to earlier and showed us a bright, punchy shot of the Tower grounds that, back in the 70s, would have made a sell-able tourist postcard. I’d recommend the FX-33 as a Christmas gift to anyone looking for an elegant camera for a non-photographer, even at its full retail price

UPDATE: The L10 is Editor’s Choice at Popular Photography.

One of this week’s featured articles on Wikipedia featured the smallest functioning 35mm camera, the Rollei 35. In celebration I took a dip in Flickr’s pool of images taken with a Rollei 35.

Untitled
Originally uploaded by jonnypawnshoppe

I’ve added a few shots from a wedding I did in Melbourn, Cambridgeshire to my main Sepial Website.

skies over brighton beach
Originally uploaded by adrians_art

Here’s a lovely family/landscape photo by a local photographer that uses a filter creatively to make give dramatic black-and-white film image even more punch. Take a look at the Website of the photographer Adrian Campfield , which he shares with his artist wife, Louize.

[I found it via the Brighton page of the Worldflicks site.]

A friend recently emailed me a link to a wedding photographer’s blog. Some of the work there was good, but I didn’t add it add the site to the blogroll here because most of it was what I am going to call “shouty photography”. The photographer had an excellent eye for composition and for an unusual viewpoint, but there was a lot of check-out-my-new-lens wide-angle/fish-eye stuff and every frame was Photoshopped to Hell: the colours were over-saturated, the brightness and contrast were cranked up, and I suspect that all sorts of background clutter had been removed by computer. (Given the intensity of the flash lighting used and the quality of those shadows that remained in the images, I am sure that others had been cloned out.) And of course, he’d been painting that artificial blur all over the place as only a man with a digital camera and the vaguest idea about aperture settings can.

I’m sure he doesn’t need the help of a link from me. His is a style that probably grabs clients immediately. I am happy to recommend other photographers with different approaches from mine, but I would never recommend one like him.

Shouty photography reminds me of the extremely stylised, self-proclaimed “new generation portraiture” of Venture, the high street family photographer. It’s expensive (to buy, if not to do), it’s manipulative (in more than one sense of that word), it’s fake, and it’s about images and not about people. When you browse a wedding photographer’s portfolio, you should be smiling at the moments captured, not thinking: “I wonder how he got that angle/effect/pose?” All photography dates, but the worst thing about this kind of work is that it’s dated the moment you get the prints. Today’s new generation is tomorrow’s old generation. In a few months time, every domestic camera owner will be using their home PC and some knocked-off digital photo software to create the same or similar effects in the hope of spicing up their own grey snaps. Then the game will be up. Ten years hence, photos that have been treated this way will be the still equivalent of those psychedelic visuals you see on old editions of Top Of The Pops.

If you are looking for a wedding photographer and one sidles up to you with an album that, the moment he opens it, screams “look at me!” then block your ears. When you’re 64, you’ll be glad you did.

I recently shot a wedding reception at Shakespeare’s Globe. Not only did the bride-and-groom do a brilliant job of organizing the event, the workers at the venue were excellent. The Globe is new to weddings so there was at least one glitch: a large window let in so much of the intense afternoon sunlight that it was blinding for many of the guests seated at their meals. Eventually a couple of the waiting staff found a large screen and blocked it. Before they did, I took this contre-jour shot with the theatre in the background:

I took two exposures of the scene. In this one, the shutter opened just before the little girl’s left foot touched the ground and closed before she stepped on the light. Now that last splash of brightness is burned in silver, probably for decades. Strange, innit?

Via The Daily Dish, I visited this amazing gallery of shattering statues. The photographer explains his method:

[T]he shooting environment must be controlled and kept consistent. The lighting is clear and direct, head on. My background is neutral, but bright enough so that the shattering object completely stands out. I drop the figurine from the same height in complete darkness while the lens of the camera is open. When the figurine hits the ground, the sound triggers the lights to go off for a fraction of a second. I do this procedure many times or until I find the one frame that is just right. I keep just one such picture for every figurine. Every attempt yields a unique outcome, so I need to look for the one that best expresses a transformation of the figurine into a new form.