Photographing Children In Public

An article by Claire    1 Comment

The other day I was playing with my kids in Queens Park when I saw a lady with a smart SLR camera, hovering around her child. She was quite clearly excited at catching those first memories of enjoying the slide or playing in the sand. But after a while, I found her constant snapping rather uncomfortable and it was clear other parents did too. Not everyone wants to be in a photograph these days.

Social media has changed the way we document our lives. There are many positives, despite efforts by the press to demonise the likes of Facebook, more of us are getting accounts and still sharing posts, above all photographs. So it’s no wonder that our approach to taking photographs in public is changing also. When my eldest had her 2nd birthday party, I felt compelled to explain to parents that I won’t be posting the images on Facebook. It was no secret I was ‘out there’ on social media and blogs and I haven’t held back images of my kids. Many of us have may have had awkward discussions already with friends who innocently posted a photo on their profile of a good night out and tagged you without checking first. More worringly, there are still a number of people who don’t have tight privacy controls on their Facebook profiles, so ‘friends of friends’ could see photographs, thus losing a little control of who is snooping on your family life.

Last year, the subject arose at blogger conferences. Parents writing openly about their own lives had found public relations and marketing companies who had stolen images of their kids. There are ways to protect your images from page visitors downloading but you have to question the ethics of these companies, quite blatantly using photographs without permission or not validating the source. You can check if anyone is using images, using tools such as Tineye, reverse image search but should you have to? Then there’s Pinterest, opening up Pandoras box to image sharing. Despite strict guidelines on copyright and warnings not to steal images away from Pinterest, the tool has enabled images to go viral more quickly. Great if you want web traffic but not so great if it’s your copyrighted images.

U.K. law does not prevent photography of people in public places, including children (source). There are provisions in the law to protect the content of a photo (i.e. what constitutes pornography or indecent) or the manner in which a photo is taken (i.e. harassment through aggressively persistently photographing). So in effect the Mum in the park was doing nothing wrong but I can’t help think we should all practice some etiquette around photographing and video around children. Trying to capture your kids without others in the background could be one (and better for your shot no doubt!). But also asking yourself, do I have to document every single moment? After all, some of the longer lasting memories are associated with smell or sound. Why not lay back, close your eyes and savor the moment in a different way.

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Claire Jones-Hughes