15k (and news for PhotoLegal fans!)

by Darren

Well, chances are you might have come here via twitter. It’s the primary social media tool that I use, because I tend to like it. It’s not for everyone, and there are some pretty extreme opinions of it, but I find it quite useful for finding information, for sharing information that I want to, and for just gossiping with people I know in real life, and people I don’t.

PhotoLegal, a podcast about photography and the law came about entirely because of twitter. I found out that James Barisic, someone my wife knew in real life but I didn’t but whom I conversed with occasionally on twitter, was an intellectual property lawyer. And having lots of questions I asked if he wanted to record a few podcasts and answer some of them, for me and for everyone else.

I met Phill Price because I decided to organise a regular photowalk in London, and Phill came along to virtually every one. We’ve become friends in real life as a result and he was a natural choice as a fellow photographer (and one with lots of experience of photographing people in public places) to take part in PhotoLegal.

We often had guests on the show, and Kate Day of the Telegraph appeared in two shows in the first series. We liked her contributions, so we invited her to become the fourth host. The thing is, we sourced most of our guests from people, mainly photographers on twitter. As a networking tool, it is very, very good.

Yes, some of the content we all post is pointless timewasting, but then we do that in real life too so why not do it online too. And just to prove how much time it can waste, if I’ve timed it correctly, the tweet announcing this post is my fifteen thousandth! It appears I’ve been ‘peeking out’ almost as often as this red squirrel.

Oh, that announcement, I almost forgot. If you’re a PhotoLegal listener you’ll know we’ve not recorded a show in about six months. We’ve all been pretty busy – for my part I spent six months working for a client in Edinburgh, and decided to visit a stupid number of countries in a single year.

Anyway, I’ve spoken to Phill and James, and we’re going to do a show (I’ve left a message for Kate, so hope in my hurry to announce that she’s up for it :-s ). It’ll probably be about all the developments since the new Government took office and the European Court ruled that Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 is illegal (one of the laws used by Police to hassle photographers taking pictures in the street). And it will probably have a lot of our usual banter and mutual baiting and mickey-taking. Some of the previous shows we recorded took hours and hours because we were having such a laugh – I’m hoping that isn’t the case this time because Louise has agreed to do the editing and I’m already in trouble enough this week!

So, I can’t tell you when, but watch both this space and the PhotoLegal website. Or you could just follow PhotoLegal on twitter! And if you didn’t get here via twitter in the first place and you’re setting up an account, by all means follow me too. Maybe if I tweeted a bit less I’d have time to record more episodes…