Street Photography - Today I was in Gothenburg at the central train station to try to shoot some street photography style pictures. It was really difficult because it was dark and people moved fast. After I went throug it a guy stopped my and told me that I'm not allowed to go around there and to take pictures of people and asked me to show him a written permisson that I'm allowed to take pictures there. I explained to him that this is not true. And reading up about it now a little bit the only thing I can't do with my pictures is to use them as or within advertising. Anyway, I'm still really bad at it so I won't be releasing many of my street photos yet. This one was todays best.
Jeena
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You are allowed to take pictures of people without asking for their permission in Sweden?!
"This foreigner doesn't know our culture, let me teach him" was it?
I would ask for police badge, or otherwise tell him to mind his own business.
Was it the prime lens you used for this one ?
Some people are not aware of what is allowed and not, most often it's these people that try to police everyone else. However, that's not a bad photo, I like it.
Good idea, I'll do that next time.
Jeena Pa I also sometimes use black and white filters while editing. Looks nice! Oh yeah I saw it now. I also wanna create a website like this. U need to help me with it :-) It is great to have a good collection of your photography at one place esp with the raw metadata. I have mine lying in different places.
Yeah, the 50mm ƒ/1.8, but it's cropped a bit too because there was a wall on the left, you can still see a bit of the reflection of it.
Not really, he didn't know that I was a foreigner before I started speaking and then I guess he knew because of my accent. I looked at the pictures I did before and he was in one of them, blurry ^^ (I don't publish blurry pictures)
Oh and btw. Taha, I added a link to pictures on my website "Show raw EXIF" and when you click it you can see all the raw metadata from EXIF :)
Honestly though, I think it's still good manners to ask first, or after..
I don't think Street photography -Richard can confirm - involve facial macro shots where you try to expose people walking, rather than the street itself and how it's lively with people in genral is the target.
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Bassem, that's a different thing, I agree. For the picture posted here on Facebook by Jeena, I think the person in the photo is very much one of the main features of the photo though. There may be reasons this person doesn't want such a photo to be publicized on the Internet.
I get ur point, I think u r correct.
There rule of thumb would be to use common sense, make it obvious that you are taking the photo of a person and ask them before or later if its fine and even offer to share the photo with them, people usually really like that! On another note, I was taking photos of a train station in Nimes (France) and the police officers told me to erase all the photos because of security reasons, note that this was way back in 2012.
Other countries have different laws, for sure. And asking before destroys the situation, which often only exists fo a couple of seconds. And most of the photos are out of focus, wrong ligting, wrong composition, etc.
Jonatan I agree and in Germany for example you have to ask before you take the shoot, which makes candit/street photography basically impossible. It's good manners, but that was not the question, the question was if you're allowed or not. It's good manners to not slurp your soup, that doesn't mean that you get fined or thorwn into jail if you do. In Germany on the other hand it is a law.
Oh and by street photography I mean this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_photography
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