One of the best things about being a camera
or lens reviewer at dpreview is that, especially when the sun is shining, you
can always disappear from the office for a while to take some sample shots in
our basement vault’s urban surroundings – it’s always a nice break from the
studio work or being stuck behind a desk. Since our office is located close to the Thames,
the river bank with its many attractive buildings (Tower Bridge, Tower
of London, City Hall, the skyline of the City with the distinctive ‘Gherkin’ building)
is the obvious place to go if you need a few additional images to finalize your
sample gallery.
Unfortunately
the area along the river appears to, at some point in the past, have been
declared an area where an authority under section 44 of the Terrorism
act is in place. In practice this means that you could be stopped at any time
by the police when taking pictures. In the name of national security they take
your details, call the back-office to verify them and generally keep you from
doing your job. Depending on your character and mood you can
then choose to simply put up with being questioned for about 20 minutes by the
police in a public space (believe me, it makes you feel pretty uncomfortable) or refuse to cooperate which theoretically could get
you into all sorts of trouble. As you can see below we are
speaking from our own experience. This is the form we were given after being stopped while taking some sample images of City Hall on the More London estate.
The pointlessness of the exercise becomes
obvious when you type ‘City Hall’ and ‘London’ into the web’s favourite search
engine. The image search yields 1,330,000 results, most of them showing the building’s
exterior and interior, from all conceivable angles, in all sizes and
resolutions. There’s even an illustration of the building’s innovatively
designed heating and ventilation system. It takes an internet connection and about
5 seconds to get your hand on this vast amount of information and, who knows, if
you put some extra effort into your googleing you might even find the building’s
blue prints. So what additional information could one possibly gather by
photographing the building from the outside?
There has been a lot of controversy about
this issue and it’s been discussed comprehensively in our forums. Britain appears to be far from the only country where such ‘incidents’ have been
reported from but, at least at the moment, it is featured disproportionately in
the discussions.
Now, it seems, there might finally be an end
to this waste of time and public money. As we’ve read in a BBC News article
today the Section 44 stop-and-search powers have been ruled illegal by the European
court of Human Rights. It might take a while before the last community support officer will have received the memo but it looks as if in the near future photographers (and crucially also camera reviewers) in urban Britain will be able to take a picture again without making themselves a terrorist suspect. Common sense prevails (pending government appeal) and you can expect many more Tower Bridge and City Hall images in the sample galleries of reviews to come - everyone's a winner.