Friday, February 15, 2008

No problem, officer. Watch me delete the pictures...

A photographer friend emailed me a link to Amateur Photographer, a British photo mag, and its story about a photographer who was shooting street scenes in Blackpool when a local cop forced him to delete his images.

You can read the whole thing here, but the essence of it is the policewoman objected to being in the guy's photos and asserted that you can't take pictures of people without their permission.

Oh, really? What about the estimated half-million surveillance cameras in London? The Wall Street Journal reported in July, 2005, that "since 2003, the license plate of every car driving into central London during weekdays is filmed as part of a program to reduce traffic congestion."

The WSJ also cited a study that a Londoner could expect to be captured by one of those cameras 300 times.

Amateur Photographer reported that the photographer complied with the order, presumably by letting her watch as he killed each of the offending images with the delete button on his Nikon D40.

What Amateur Photographer didn't say was that the "deleted" images were still on the card and wouldn't be truly destroyed until their locations on the card were overwritten by new images.

So all the photographer had to do was take the card home and retrieve all of the images with SanDisk RescuePRO or Lexar's ImageRescue or some other disk recovery software.

Then he could mail the officer some prints of herself with a terse greeting.

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