photographersrights

A long-time Los Angeles Times photographer was arrested on the side of a road yesterday while transmitting photos he shot of former First Lady Nancy Reagan's funeral motorcade.

Mickey H. Osterreicher is a lawyer who has served as General Counsel of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) since 2006. We had a chat with Osterreicher about his life and the state of photographers' rights.

It seems the Melissa Click saga has come to an end. A few months after being filmed confronting a photojournalist during a student protest at the University of Missouri, the mass media professor was fired yesterday for infringing on the student's rights.

Recently I've been trying to get better at bracketing, where you take overexposed and underexposed photos and then merge them together. It can create a very neat effect when done correctly. It can also be abused, as many photographers tend to do, which results in unrealistic looking photography.

A few days ago, I was out playing with this feature in my hometown of Cheswick, Pennsylvania, to better understand it when I was stopped by police.

In a surprise decision in the US court system, a federal judge ruled last Friday that photographing and filming police officers isn't always protected by the First Amendment.

Flashback to last summer. July 2, 2015, the day after Canada Day. And the day I got kicked off a beach in Toronto for taking pictures...

Photographers in Serbia are protesting and raising awareness this week in response to a new proposal in parliament that threatens the basic copyright of their photos.

TIME's latest contract for photographers has been at the center of controversy for about a month now, and many photographers are still refusing to sign it as they campaign for more favorable terms.

Ken Duncan, one of Australia's most famous landscape photographers, is publicly fighting for photographers' rights in Australia after being "nearly arrested" last Friday after being spotted by "Big Brother" while shooting on public land.

Earlier today, we shared a viral video of student photojournalist Tim Tai being confronted by activists while photographing the ongoing University of Missouri protests. One of the main people under fire for their actions in the video is Melissa Click, an assistant professor of mass media.

Cameraman Mark Schierbecker has just posted a longer version of his video (embedded above) that shows Click's role in the human media blockade more clearly.

Ongoing student protests at the University of Missouri over campus race relations have dominated the media over the the past several days. Now a new video showing the group blocking a student photographer is sparking controversy and discussion about press freedom.

The 6.5-minute video above shows student photographer Tim Tai being blocked from a public area of campus on Monday while on assignment for ESPN.

While riding the subway on Halloween this past weekend, Mike Furlender witnessed a …

A New York Police Department officer has been convicted of a felony for lying about the arrest of a New York Times photographer back in 2012.

The city of Atlanta, Georgia, has an old local law from 1977 that makes it illegal to shoot photos of people on public sidewalks. The law has never resulted in an arrest or citation, but it did make the news last week after police officers reportedly cited the ordinance to prevent photographers from taking pictures on city sidewalks.

The NPPA and 11 news organizations wrote a letter to Atlanta's mayor, Kasim Reed, and now Atlanta is saying that the law will be repealed.

The National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) announced this week that it has joined in on a new lawsuit filed against the state of Wyoming over recent laws that criminalizes "data collecting" in "open land." Among other things, the NPPA argues that the laws put photojournalists on the wrong end of the law for legitimate work.

Photographer Trey Ratcliff is currently on a photo walk tour of the United States. On Wednesday, he visited Atlanta, Georgia, and led a large crowd of photographers on a route through the city. While strolling through Centennial Olympic Park, however, the group was confronted by police officers and told that their photography wasn't allowed in the public park.

A 16-year-old boy has caused a stir after releasing a video showing himself being denied the right to film a checkpoint pat-down -- something the TSA officially allows.

If you're a photographer in Fargo, North Dakota, beware: if someone thinks you're acting "creepy" or "suspicious," you could have your reputation destroyed in a very public way.

Just days after one photographer was kicked out of a McDonalds after taking pictures of kids, another photographer has been banned from Fargo's public pools and shamed online after being accused of the same thing.

An Ohio man was arrested on Monday after he witnessed a car crash and, instead of helping the injured occupants, decided to capture the results of the accident with his cell phone from inside the crashed car.

The Washington City Paper recently decided to boycott the Foo Fighters' restrictive concert photo contract by buying photos from fans instead. Now a different paper is protesting that same contract in a much different way.

This past weekend, the Quebec newspaper Le Soleil decided to send a cartoon sketch artist to cover a Foo Fighters' concert instead of putting a photographer in the media area.

Photographer Randall Armor recently wrote an article about the war on photographers in which one scary 'P' word is being thrown around: the accusation of being a pedophile. News stories like the one above don't help the cause.

The 3-minute segment features an interview with a mother who called her local news station's whistleblower hotline. She says she and her family were "disturbed" and "shaken" recently after discovering a man taking pictures of her kids at a McDonald's restaurant.

Good news for photographers in Europe: freedom of panorama will live on to see another day -- in most countries, at least. Today the European Parliament voted on a controversial proposal that threatened to restrict the photography of copyrighted buildings and sculptures from public places. An overwhelming majority of MEPs voted against the plan.

Over the last couple of weeks, the matter of photo contracts has once again been debated. First came Jason Sheldon’s blog post, calling Taylor Swift out on her hypocrisy when attacking Apple for demanding musicians give away their music for free while doing the exact same thing to concert photographers in her photo contracts. If you’re reading this, you’re probably well aware of that whole ordeal, so there’s no need to get into it further other than to say that I fully support Sheldon’s views.

Karl Baden should have known better.

I mean, what was he thinking, casually snapping a few pictures as dramatic sunlight broke through the clouds after one of last week’s late spring rainstorms? From the front seat of his car in a suburban Boston Trader Joe’s parking lot, of all places? What is he, nuts?

This past weekend, journalist Josiah Daniel Ryan visited a public pier in New York City to shoot a video of some boats there. He was then confronted by a number of security guards, one of whom told him that tripods "are not allowed on New York City property."

Back in April, we reported that there was a new bill in Colorado that aimed to protect citizens' rights to record police and to punish officers who interfere with those rights. Well, good news for photographers: the bill has been signed into law.

Three years ago, a woman named Felicia Anderson won a judgement against the city of Atlanta after she was arrested while photographing the arrest of a neighbor. She later complained that the city had largely ignored the court order. This week a judge agreed with her and held Atlanta in contempt for not taking steps to uphold photographers' rights.

For more than a decade, Brooklyn-based professional photographer Shawn Thomas has been an outspoken activist for photographers' rights to photograph and record in public on the streets of New York City. In the process, he has been arrested and jailed at least six times but never convicted of any crime.

This week, Thomas is making headlines again after posting a video showing how he put an end to an "unlawful search" in just 7 seconds while pointing a camera at officers.

There have been a number of controversial bills and laws lately, some of which have been pulled or vetoed after protests from photographers and the public. The latest legislation to raise eyebrows comes from the state of Wyoming, which passed a new law in March that prohibits collecting data about the environment to share with the government. Problem is, the wording is so broad that it infringes on photographers' rights.

Last week, an Australian mother took to the Internet to publicly shame a 'creep' she caught taking pictures of her children at a shopping center. After the story blew up and sparked all kinds of outrage, it turns out the man was simply taking a selfie with a Darth Vader cutout to send to his kids.

If you're ever asked by an airline to stop taking pictures on their private property -- on their plane, for example -- you might want to obey their instructions and put your camera away. They're legally allowed to ban photography.

Baltimore photojournalist J. M. Giordano of the City Paper has been on the front lines of protests in the wake of Freddie Gray's death in police custody. Yesterday morning, Giordano and another protestor were apparently swarmed by police officers and beaten -- and the whole thing was caught on camera.

Yesterday we shared a startling video in which a woman who was pointing her smartphone camera at a group of law enforcement officers had the device snatched from her hand, smashed against the ground, and then kicked back at her. It turns out the man who did it is a deputy U.S. marshal, and the U.S. Marshals Service says it's now investigating the incident.

Here’s a video that’s causing an uproar among those who care about photographers’ rights. It’s a 53-second clip recorded …

It was a month ago that a Texas lawmaker sparked a hoopla by proposing a bill that would limit the photography and filming of officers. If passed, anyone caught pointing a camera at an officer from within 25 feet could be charged with breaking the law.

Public outcry was swift and loud, and people even began sending death threats to the representative's office. Good news today: the bill is now dead.

A Texas lawmaker recently attracted death threats after proposing a law that would make it illegal for photographers to take pictures of police officers from within 25 feet of them. Colorado is moving in the opposite direction.

The state is considering several bills that would increase police oversight, and one of the bills outlines punishments for police officers who interfere with people who are lawfully using their cameras.

Prominent photography groups are sounding the alarm about a new bill that was just passed by the Arkansas Senate. SB-79, the "Personal Rights Protection Act," would require photographers to get written consent from a stranger to feature their likeness in a photograph for most purposes.

The law could have a huge implication on street photography, whose practitioners thrive on the ability to capture life and people on camera without having to constantly stop and ask for releases from the subjects.

Photographer Marisha Camp and her brother Jessie were recently passing through West Virginia on a nationwide tour for a documentary series when they were reportedly confronted by "a hostile mob." The residents were suspicious of the photo taking and allegedly harassed and detained the duo until a trooper arrived and escorted the photographers from the scene.

Texas House of Representatives lawmaker Jason Villalba sparked quite a controversy earlier this month after proposing a bill that would make it illegal to photograph a police officer from within 25 feet. People were so angered by the idea that Villalba has received death threats from angry members of the public.

A week after Los Angeles agreed to train its law enforcement that public photography is not a crime, a bill has been proposed in Texas that would make it a crime for citizens to photograph or film police from within 25 feet of where the are.