There is this wonderful little park in Kensington Market called Bellevue Park. They have a decent playground, a wading pool and a crazy statue of the King of Kensington, Al Waxman. This was the location of my third session of “Portraits in the Park”. The session started off okay, despite the impending thunderstorm (which never did happen). Andrea was the first to show up, followed by Allan, Sean and his friend Heather, Carrie and Nadia. So I pretty much shot everyone without and hitch and a few of us stayed and hang out while we waited to see if anyone else would show up. In the meantime Carrie pulled out her camera, popped on her 300mm lens and started shooting things around the park. Needless to say the camera got the attention of some of the locals in the park and they started screaming across the park to not take pictures of her. After stating that she wasn’t taking pictures of them, they proceeded to close in on us, streaming at us and making a huge scene, saying it was illegal for us to be taking pictures in the park and they they would have the legal right to take our film or smash our cameras. It wasn’t a pretty sight, and eventually they left us alone unscathed after Nadia deleted two images on her camera, that showed “their crowd” in the blurry background.

I did get a little worried as they start accusing all of us, stating that they saw me taking pictures earlier. If they were really paying attention, they would have noticed that I was taking pictures of certain people, who I knew, who also signed model releases and not random riff raff like them.

Sean provided me with a link to this interesting article. Basically, we have a legal right to be able to shoot pictures of people in public, doing public things without getting their consent. But publishing this photos, consent may be required. In any case, we were infact doing nothing illegal. And if the woman decided to smash anyone of our cameras, she would be in the wrong.

Shortly after the incident, it started to spit, so we took that as a cue to leave. Carrie and Nadia joined me for drinks at the Emmbassy down the street, followed shortly by Stefan, who couldn’t find us in the park. But this isn’t where the story ends. Afterwards, there was still a bit of light, so I told Stefan that we should head back to the park to do his shots and finish off my roll. By this point the locals that verbally attacked us were gone. In any case we decided to go over to the far end of the park, by the Al Waxman statue. This is where we found this character [I totally understand Matt's title now]. So I quickly shot off my roll on Stefan and his Bike, and then we were gonna head down to a exhibit opening at Pikto, but before we left Carrie wanted to try and get pictures of the guy by the statue. Needless to say, Carrie’s 300mm didn’t go unnoticed and the guy came over screaming at her. It didn’t last as long as the first encounter, as we packed up and started to leave, but the guy still had time to put a death curse on Carrie.

So never again will I be shooting any pictures in that park and this is the reason why I don’t like shooting strangers in public.

The next session of Portraits in the Park is going to be at Ashbridges Bay Park tomorrow (Sunday. August 7th) I will be out there most of the afternoon for a Birthday party. Drop me a comment or an email if you wanna make it out to this one and I can give you my cellphone number so you can track me down. Otherwise, I’ll also be at Clarke Beach (aka Cherry Beach) on Thursday August 11th anytime after 6:30pm. There’s gonna be a Flickr meetup there, so you may wanna check that out.

PS: Nadia has a better account of the first encounter on her blog

UPDATE : I will near the sheltered picnic area by the children’s playground this afternoon in Ashbridges Bay Park. Probably between 2 and 6ish