AAAaaaarrrrggghhh!

It has been a frustrating past few days.

After being promised faithfully by Nottingham Police that I would have a full written answer to my Freedom of Information Act request following up the letter I was sent from Jacqui Smith, confirming that there was no restriction on photography in public places, but mentioning that local Chief Constables had the authority to restrict photography under certain circumstances, I have since heard nothing.

Back in June, I wrote to my own Chief Constable (Mr Green) here in Nottingham, and asked him what those circumstances might be and how would these restrictions be imposed and how would the public (and press) be advised? Not only did I receive an acknowledgement, but also I was verbally assured of the written response by Tuesday 8th July.

I will be most interested to hear the excuses offered for non-compliance to my simple request.


I have been having problems with a hard drive as well. Normally I have a succession of back ups for all my work, much as I am sure most photographers do, so that in theory, if my back-up drive fails, I always have a back-up to the back-up available, and in addition a plethora of CD-ROMs and DVD discs. But being a tad naive I had transferred a number of images to a separate disc whilst I was doing some ‘spring cleaning’ and for whatever reason they were not backed up properly on other drives. The inevitable happened and I triggered an automatic back up to this one drive that was ‘fuller’ than usual. The back up took place and filled the drive to capacity (500 GB) and then the disc went into tantrum mode and became inaccessible. Grrrr!

Several software recovery packages can see the files on the disc but I am having the devils own job of recovering them. Finally Active@File Recovery seems to be able to access the files and I am recovering them by file type. Bit of a pain in resorting, but at least I seem to be able to recover most of my data.

There is a lesson to be learned there somewhere…

© Pete Jenkins
www.petejenkins.co.uk
www.photographerspro.eu/pete_jenkins/