First Church of Christ Scientist, Boston, originally uploaded by DaveWilsonPhotography.

I’ve just realised that I’ve neglected to update the blog for over a week! Sorry about that. What with kids back at school, sports starting back up again and business trips, things have been a bit busy recently.

By way of background to my last blog post, I spent a week in Boston attending the Embedded Systems Conference and managed to tag a day on at the beginning of the trip to get together with Brian Matiash and Bob Lussier to shoot pictures around the city. We had a great time and one of the most spectacular locations we visited was the plaza in front of First Church of Christ Scientist.

This plaza contains a fabulous array of buildings in different architectural styles placed around a large reflecting pool. For lovers of HDR and architecture photography, it was a dream and we spent a couple of hours shooting different buildings and different angles.

One of the views I really wanted to grab was a wide angle shot of the Prudential tower and various other tall buildings reflecting in the pool. Unfortunately, on Sunday afternoon, there was a bit of a breeze so the reflection wasn’t too impressive. Assuming it would be calmer early in the morning, I headed out again the next day and set up to take a few more shots. On Monday morning, the plaza was deserted except for a couple of yellow-jacketed security guards. After 10 minutes or so, I was approached by one of these gentlemen who, very politely, checked on what I was doing. I indicated that I was an amateur photographer and blogger capturing images for my own collection at which point he and told me that the building was “copyright” since they were keen to control the use of its image and that I would need a permit to continue shooting.

On checking later, however, I discovered that it is not possible to copyright images of a building in the US if that building was built before 1990 and is visible from a public place. In this particular case, the building is obviously older than 20 years so the claim cannot apparently be true. The church is, of course, very much visible from a public place even though this particular shot was taken from the plaza which is apparently private land.

Given our experiences at the John Hancock building (which prompted the previous post), it definitely pays to be aware of your rights to take photographs in a public place especially if you are shooting in a large US city. Take a look at Pete Talke’s recent post outlining those rights if you have a minute. Please note, however, that this applies to the US only and that rules are very different in other countries.