Street Photography: Children — law, morals & ethics, commonsense

Henri Cartier-Bresson was a 20th century French photographer. He is considered the father of photojournalism and perhaps the most important pioneer of street photography.

Cartier-Bresson was more than a street photographer. His images transcended the genre in a way that street photographers aspire, but rarely achieve. Cartier-Bresson was a humanist photographer. His photographs tell the stories of human endeavor, customs, social and economic class, human character and characteristics, behavior and distinctiveness. His photographs purposefully witness human nature.

Cartier-Bresson walked the streets of the world from the 1930s through the early 1970s, after which he retired to drawing and painting until his death in 2004.

There was little fear of public photographers while Cartier-Bresson walked the streets of the world with his 35mm Leica, unlike the last four decades which have seen increasing fear of public photography, rising almost to hysteria after 9/11. Today, street photographers, particularly those photographing children, must balance their desire to capture candid storytelling moments, with the potential of physical attacks, and social media witch hunts with the potential to destroy one's reputation and career.

GDPR explained and vacation photo hacks to deal with it

In recent weeks you've likely received dozens of updated privacy notices. They're due to the implementation of the European Union's (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It went into effect on May 25. For some time to come, we'll be learning how far it reaches into daily life.

GDPR was written to strengthen European citizen's privacy rights and stop abuses by social media enterprises and other businesses who collect personal data and share it, often without the knowledge of users and customers.

Unfortunately, GDPR seems to have some unintended consequences.

Vacation photography is a staple of travel. Today, more photos than ever are made by travelers of all kinds. In the 21st century, travelers whip out their cellphones to photograph everything and anything they see. Sometimes, within seconds of making them, their photos are posted online for all to see.

Safely post your vacation photos while you're away, especially of your children

You're away from home on a “trip of a lifetime,” or perhaps just an ordinary outing to the summer seashore, but whichever vacation you're on, you've decided to post some photos of it, showing how much fun you're having. For family vacations, you decide to post photos of your kids for their grandparents, and the rest of your family and friends, to see and enjoy.

So, you pull out your smartphone or camera, and get some great images of your family on vacation, having the time of their lives. You log into Twitter or your Facebook account or Flickr, or Smugmug, and upload the photos.

“Does that make sense?”

“Is it safe to post vacation photos, which may include your children, to the Internet, while on vacation?”

Farewell to Facebook, at least for galleries and samples

Facebook has been in the news lately, and for many, the news hasn't been good.

Privacy issues continue to be in the news, as Facebook continues to adjust and readjust user privacy settings, requiring users to constantly reassess Facebook privacy policies, settings' options, and how Facebook has changed user settings from prior user choices.

Lately Facebook not only added their own email service, but without consulting their users, unilaterally changed their users' default displayed contact email address to users' new @Facebook.com email address, without so much as a simple notification of the change.

While it's true it's easy to change the default contact address back to the old one, I would ask why that should be necessary, why Facebook would decide to “tamper” with their users' contact address at all, and why Facebook didn't contact a single user, letting them know they made the change, and if not desired, how to revert back to their original address.