Fair play for standing your ground.

I too would advise writing a polite letter to the building owners - bet they’d be very interested to hear from you. You might even get a free meal in the restaurant out of it ;)

Given the manners displayed by the ’suits’ I’d knock off a letter to the buildings owners, local MP/councillor and the local rag. If this is how Liverpool businesses are dealing with culture in the year of culture, it should be publicised locally.

Kudos for standing your ground.

- Security guards have no remit beyond their own property; if they provide security for the passport office they have no right to quiz you about something else unless they provide security for the ‘estate’ itself.

- No one can stop you shooting from public property, although you may not be able to sell the picture if the building is trademarked unless it is ‘incidental’ to the whole image.

Don’t let the zealots get you down!

Anyways, keep up the fantastic work, yours is the first blog i check when I go online and a visual treat is always waiting for me. I can’t remember a bad shot on here, such consistancy and vision is a rare thing. Hope all is well with you, no doubt I will see you soon at some random ‘pool event. Take care J

I didn’t object because I was on private property already, but the jobsworth who stopped me said I would be causing an obstruction. Wouldn’t let me leave the tripod with him so we we decided how we’d divide up into photographers and tripod holders.
While we were arguing who’d go up first some character came out of the lift with a mountain bike. He was allowed to carry it up to the observation deck. Obstruction my ass.

Perhaps photographers should all put a link on their website to the Photographers Rights website.

An excellent site which has a pdf file of your rights and a Question & Answer facility.

and follow the link to Linda’s website at Sirimo to download a pdf on photography and the law.

I used to get stopped during the 1980’s quite a lot. I photographed asround the Beetham Tower about two months ago without any problems. ( tea break? )

There have been quite a few incidences recently around Britain and there are videos and articles appearing on the internet to document the situation.

See: http://www.flickr.com/photos/photodrift/2422740769/

Unless photographers start to take action and stand up for their rights, future generations will miss out on street photography during this era.

Some recent events:
Amateur stopped photographing Victoria Station in Manchester.
Photographer dealt with aggressively by manager of a mobile phone shop manager in Southport who demanded the images of the shop be deleted.

There is a file which you can download and print out and carry with you at:

http://www.ephotozine.com/download/43/5

My account of the events are as it happened, aside from the black ops helicopters of course. The security guard from Beetham
West Tower came out and had a chat with me. He was polite enough about it but insisted that I need permission to take photographs from
public property. I debated this and he used his radio to talk to someone. It is entirely possible that the passport office were simply monitoring the situation via CCTV and just happened to come out at the same time. But he definitely used his radio to tell someone that I refused to leave. I told him that I was not refusing to leave. Security from the passport office arrived moments after this. The guy in a suit told me I can’t take photos of Beetham Tower without permission. I had no idea why he was arguing the case for someone elses building. Eventually he threatened police action and told me to get lost.

This definitely happened and if they saw me on CCTV it should be logged somewhere as proof. Its as simple as that really.