Daniel Schwabe's blog/

I've been travelling for professional reasons for the past 2 weeks. My last trip was to Houston, Texas. Evidently, the first chance I had I went out to grab some pictures of skyscrapers and window reflections, which are all over the place there (I'll be posting some in the near future).

But here is an episode that made me wonder about the current mindset of some people in the US. I parked my car in a driveway of a building complex, so I could step out and get a good angle on a particularly interesting window reflection. Much to my surprise, one minute after I got out and started shooting, two security people came out of the adjacent building and asked me if I had permission to photograph the buildings (accross the street, mind you). Obviously I said I did not have, so the informed me that taking pictures was not allowed, and asked me to please step inside the building, where they proceeded to ask for my identification, called their supervisor because it was necessary to make an "unauthorized media incident report", the whole shebang. One of the officers informally told me that such rigor was due to 9/11 related fears of a repeat incident. They also asked me to delete the pictures I had taken.

So they wrote down all my id information (which is in Portuguese, but they had a hard time understanding that I am not Portuguese but Brazilian...), and told me, in front of a newly summoned Houston Police officer, that they would be filing this report. Then they were satisfied and said I was free to go. Before leaving, I inquired whether my offense was for taking pictures OF the property, of for doing so WITHIN the property, and they explained that it was the latter. If I stood in the public sidewalk there was nothing they could do. Of course, I immediately proceeded to walk out to another parking area outside the property, and took the pictures again.

While I was waiting to cross a traffic light (on foot, holding my camera), a foreman that was inside a maintenance truck came out and asked me if everything was ok, looking at my camera. I said yes, I was only waiting to cross the street. Then he asked me whether I was taking any pictures of wires/cables (he seemed to be doing some maintenance on them), and when I replied that I was only taking pictures of window reflections, and had no intrerest whatsoever in wires (to the contraty), he was satisfied and walked away.

Having come back from Europe, where I took thousands of pictures everywhere withouth being bothered once, I started wondering how sad it is that people have become so scared and paranoid in the US... things have definitely changed...

Has anybody had similar experiences?

Groups to me will be a way to meet new people (and see new work) that don't already belong to my "extended" network. Whether they are awards, contests, etc..., I don't care. Let each group define their rules, each one can join according to his (or her) own tastes, likes and dislikes; there should be plenty of options, hopefully. And, if you are not happy, just create your own and see if you find similarly minded people!
As far as features are concerned, I hope Team Ipernity will keep the approach of allowing you to interact 1-on-1 as well as group wise. It is nice to be able to be notified that somebody answered a comment you have made without having to go back to the group thread or the specific picture to see it.
There are also many group management functionalities that can be useful (e.g., many provided by greasemonkey scripts) which could be directly incorporated in the site, but let's see how they have started to implement it.
And, once again, a big thanks to Team Ipernity!