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.

Brian is going to a wedding and wants some tips. I’m guessing he’s taking a digital point-and-shoot so this gives me an excuse to give some slightly different advice from my usual as well as to summarise some of my old favourites. Brian’s first commenter is right: you should take lots of photos and hope for some good shots, but if you do so with some simple rules-of-thumb in mind then your hit rate will be significantly higher.

First of all, leave the set-pieces—cake-cutting, stiffs-in-rows—to the pros and the billion monkeys. If you want to come away from the celebrations with something different then do something different.

So sneak away from the centre of the action is and sneak up on some characters.

One advantage of having lots of memory capacity to hand, as Brian plans, is that you can stop chimping and concentrate on what’s going around you. When you are checking your work and deleting dud frames you are not keeping your eye out for interesting action and capturing good frames.

Use your optical zoom (not your digital zoom) to get in close whenever you can. Practically the first piece of advice I gave here was to forget about including legs and background objects when you photograph people. No one is interested in trousers and church spires; they want to see human emotions.

If you are using the long end of your lens to magnify the view then you should remember that this will magnify your own body movements as well, increasing the blurring caused by camera shake so, if your camera has it, use its built-in image stabilization. If it hasn’t then learn to hold it steady and/or get a cheapo tripod

If possible, avoid using your built-in flash. It turns humans into cardboard cut-outs, with red eyes, flat features, and harsh silhouettes and shadows. If you can’t use flash then you’ll need to get where the light is: outdoors, near entrances, by windows. If the light is low and you want to avoid blur then you need shorter exposures so choose higher ISO speeds and, if your camera gives you control over aperture settings, use a bigger aperture—that’s a lower f-number. (The least-bad on-camera flashes are those that are positioned furthest away from the lens so keep this in mind when you buy and, if your camera allows you to, try to get a remote flash.) In fact, opening the aperture up wide, but not too much, is the key to giving portrait shots intimacy and depth—as opposed to depth-of-field.

Try taking some shots where your target isn’t in the centre of the frame. Focus on the eyes of your subject and then recompose to put them exactly where you want them. Here are some things you might want to think about in those milliseconds of reframing: keep background clutter out of the shot, put more space on the side of the frame they are looking towards, remember the rule-of-thirds, and take advantage of dramatic diagonals and other “ambient” framing.

The last piece of advice I have to offer is a bit of a downer for the dilettante: the best photos I have taken have come from my being “on” continuously for hours at an event. I never touch a drop of booze; I eat very little; I only have one ear on any conversation I am taking part in; and I always, always have at least one camera with me. Of course, you don’t have to be a party-pooper if you’re one of a billion: you’re bound to get lucky and create a masterpiece eventually. Stands to reason, dunnit?

Via lifehacker come these tips on better nature photography.

Via lifehacker, I see that Digital Photography School has an interesting essay up entitled How to Be a Curious Photographer.

I’ve never been to a wedding that didn’t have some kind of edible centrepiece. Usually it’s a cake, but these days stacks of exotic cheeses are fashionable too. Most wedding cakes aren’t as amazing as the ones self-proclaimed “Food Porn Goddess Extraordinaire” Jennifer makes and blogs about at jintrinsique so it can be difficult to come up with an interesting way to shoot them. And shoot them you must, because the cake is the opposite of the marriage: it is the duty of the guests to see that it lasts as little time as possible; someone has to make a record of it.

Not being a technical, landscape, or architectural photographer I have less practice with inanimate objects; for me, the Problem Of The Wedding Cake is an extension of the Problem Of The Static Subject. It:

• doesn’t move,
• doesn’t have or express emotions, and
• doesn’t interact with other objects

so you have to do these things for it. You can move on behalf of the Static Subject, for example by shooting it from an odd angle. You can fake emotion, for example by shooting the Static Subject in light that suggests a particular mood. You can photograph a Non-Static Subject or two (the bride and groom) interacting with the the Static Subject. This is of course the classic “cutting of the cake” shot—and it’s a bitch.

First of all, no matter what you do, the shot will be corny. Second, it is inevitable that this ceremony will happen later in the day, indoors, and away from a window so you will probably have to use flash. To make this worse, the knife-wielding couple will be stuck in a corner against a pale background and you will have to navigate around tens of snap-happy wedding guests all going for the same shot. You can get as fancy as you like with your diffusers and reflectors and bouncers, but in the absence of your own lighting crew, there will be unwanted harsh shadows; your job is to keep them out of frame—an off-camera flash can help with this. Third, you won’t get many shots of the actual cutting. The punters will get under your feet or in the frame and—no matter how much you want to tell them to get lost and no matter how nasty you are off duty—you are being paid to be nice. The bride and groom will very quickly either mark the cake irreversibly or get bored.

If anyone has any advice on how to deal with the wedding cake challenge I would be happy to read it, but here are my main tips:

• Make sure you are the first there when the cake is put on display at the reception venue and try to get some shots of it under natural light. If necessary remove distracting background objects and ask the catering staff to arrange it in the most photogenic way possible—perhaps even asking if the table can be moved nearer to a useful source of light.
• Find out from the couple when the cutting will take place and try to be the first person on the scene.
• Take advantage of the cake’s immobility. Sure, a Static Subject can be boring but you can set up a tripod in front of it without missing the shot and (even handheld) use slower shutter speeds—indeed you can experiment with a long exposure and capture blurs of movement around it.
• Make sure that you are there just before the cake gets taken away to be cut into pieces. Everyone else with a camera will have lost interest by then, you’ll get an inside view of the cake, and it’s just a smidgen more interesting than pictures of a smiling husband and wife slicing the icing.

I prefer to scout out wedding ceremony and reception venues in advance of proceedings. My best results have come from jobs where I’ve had a chance to meet and photograph the couple on location beforehand. My next assignment, for example, is on an island and I am very glad I have had a chance to check it out because, scenic as it is, it poses some interesting practical challenges.

The first hard lesson I learned about wedding photography I learned through an unfortunate experience of friends. Their photographers didn’t know until the time of the wedding itself that the use of flash was banned in the very old and gloomy chapel where they were getting spliced. Because the husband-and-wife team who were doing the job only had slow film with them, every shot of the ceremony suffered from motion blur.

I should point out that these were art photographers who’d been invited to film the day officially, rather than hacks like me. I never go anywhere without a few rolls of fast (800 or 1600 ASA) film and hardened event snappers tend to have multiple fall-back plans: in my case three cameras, three tripods, three flashes, several lenses and a lot of different rolls of film. (If I’d been stuck with rolls of 100ASA in the situation described I’d have underexposed it two stops and hoped that the job could be rescued by pushing it in the lab.)

Don’t just ask about flash photography; find out where and how much light falls inside and out, look for good areas to take group shots, check out the parking situation, ask the registrar/celebrant about his or her policy on taking photographs during proceedings—often this is discouraged during the vows and prohibited during the actual signing of the register; the document is Crown Copyright. Perhaps as important as all this, you should get some idea of what the skin, hair, and clothing colours of the happy-couple-to-be will be on the day and choose your film and lens filters/flash diffusers accordingly.

But, apart from checking out the rules and regs, there’s another good reason to pitch up on site early: you can prepare some scene-setting shots in the absence of distracting humans.

Take (some slow film,) a wide-angle lens, a stand for your camera, and a remote shutter release and arrange to be there when the grounds are quiet. In the case of the photo below I set up the camera and invited the future groom to press the shutter release. He used a screened version of the image to decorate the wedding invitations.