[Leica] Paying to shoot

[kleinp at BATTELLE.ORG (Klein, Peter A)]

It sometimes gets even funnier.

I was in Venice, inside a beautiful church.  I asked the woman at the
door if it would be all right to take some pictures with no flash or
tripod.  She said, no flash, fine, thank you for asking, mille grazie. 

So I'm in one of the chapels, and this German tour group walks in.
After a few minutes, I clicked the shutter.  The tour guide stopped her
talk, glared at me, and said, very imperiously, "No pictures!!"  I said,
"What are you talking about? I have permission."  She said, "All right."
I later saw her leave with the group, so she wasn't specifically
connected with the church.  From her speech and her manner, I'm pretty
sure she was German, not Italian.  So it wasn't her church, and it
wasn't even her country, but she felt free to tell me that I couldn't
photograph.

Moral:  Sometimes people assume authority that they don't really have.
It's not just the rent-a-cops who think they can confiscate your film
for taking a picture of "their" building from a public street.

Many blanket no-photography rules are in place simply to prevent the
distraction of flash or the obstruction of tripods.  Many times just
saying, "I don't use flash" opens the door.  In Italy, the phrase "senza
flash" did the trick.  It enabled me to get shots like this one:
http://users.2alpha.com/~pklein/italy/MadonChildChant.htm

But not in Vivaldi's church in Venice (Chiesa della Pieta).  The Guy In
Charge of Making Sure Nobody Did Anything Wrong saw me lift my camera
and said "No peectures."  I said, "Senza flash?"  He responded by
bellowing, "NO PEECTURES," so loud that I could swear I saw the painted
cherubs on the ceiling put their fingers in their ears.  The echo
resonated about the beautiful domed sanctuary for several seconds.  Far
more distracting than the click of my Leica shutter would have been.  Of
course, I complied.  

Outside the church, I met a young woman doctor from Taiwan who was on
vacation from her job at a women's clinic in rural Tennessee.  She asked
if I would photograph her family with their camera.  It turns out her
husband had been a press photographer, recognized my Leica, and figured
I must be serious.  He asked me if I was a pro.  We chatted, and it
turned out Signor NO PEECTURES had yelled at them, too.  So we took
pictures of each other outside the church with each other's cameras, and
I gave them some nice shots of their kid eating gelato.

It later turned out that I have a picture that church's domed ceiling on
the album of a 1970s Vivaldi recording.  So there.

--Peter

Tina wrote: 
> Many people put up notices that no photographs are allowed 
> without having the slightest right or reason to do so.  If it is 
> private property, you are right.  The property owner has the right to 
> prohibit photography.  Otherwise, photography is a legal right.