A Photographer's Rights

Hamley's Toy Store in London - You can even shoot 

inside a department store. 

If it's open to the public

you can shoot it! It only depends 

on if you

are publishing/

selling 

photos 

or if there

are subjects that have a copyright.

I came across great photography/photo blog called Soup Belly. They had a posting about knowing your rights as a photographer. (You can find the original blog posting here).

The idea is that there seems to be a lot of misconceptions about what can and can't be photographed. Perhaps taking a photograph of someone's yard from the street seems to be private because it's someone's property, but according to the article by Andrew Kantor, Your rights as a photographer,  as long as you are in a public place, you have every right to shoot those photos. It's only when you try to sell those photos you have to worry about getting permissions.

I've often questioned when out shooting... Can I "legally" take this photo? Am I trespassing? Do I have a right to be shooting that person?

I have always tried to be very careful about people's privacy. That goes for even shooting strangers in public. This is ONLY because I didn't understand the rights!

Kantor summarizes it nicely: 

"The law in the United States of America is pretty simple. You are allowed to photograph anything with the following exceptions:

• Certain military installations or operations.

• People who have a reasonable expectation of privacy. That is, people who are some place that's not easily visible to the general public, e.g., if you shoot through someone's window with a telephoto lens.That's it."

I highly recommend checking out the original article if you have any doubts as to what your rights are.

This is something that we really didn't talk much about in any of my photography classes so I found it very helpful and I hope anyone questioning will as well!