This morning, my lovely wife and I went for a little wander in the sunshine to a church in the area, to see what the photographic opportunities might be.  It’s an old church, and not the most beautiful I’ve seen, but with the green of the trees and sunny blue skies, perhaps there was scope for something.  Well, I figure I need a tilt-shift lens, becuase you I couldn’t get far enough away for my 17-40mm lens to catch the tower without significant distortion.  I got a few shots that I was prepared to show the world.

While mooching around the church yard with my camera and enormous Crumpler bag, I was pondering the implications of what I was doing.  What would locals think of my activities?  What would the Church (organisation, not building!) think?  Was I inadvertently breaking some moral, social or legal obligation?

For starters, there’s all those graves.  My own views on the end of mortal life aside, these were once people with parents, and one presumes most likely siblings and children too.  You can’t just go wandering all over the place without any consideration for what you might be walking on.  How do you know where the graves even are in churches of a certain age?  Headstones aren’t always in neat rows, and the absence of a headstone may not mean anything.  Then there’s the headstones themsleves; while most are obviously old and many essentially untended, there are those where it’s obvious they’re looked after regularly, and osme look far more recent.  I’m always wary of photographing anything that might have the personal details of somebody who still has living relatives that come and care for the grave, so photographing headstones needs some care to try and avoid getting too much detail.

Then there’s the legalities of it.  The church yard is owned by the church, and as such is private property.  If the church wanted to stop photography on its grounds, I’m sure it would have the legal and moral right to do so.  But in the absence of notices, what rememdy would a church have to prevent use of photographs taken on its grounds?  Could the shape and visual amenity of a building be copyrighted, or even specific views and settings that could only be obtained on private property?

So although they’re not great pictures, they aren’t too terrible in my biased opinion, and if it would help the church in websites or leaflets to use them, I’d be happy to let them have a license to use them for the promotion of the church and its activities.  But, I’m slightly wary of approaching them, for fear of opening a can of worms.

Plenty of people photograph churches, and legal people aren’t making themselves very rich off the back of it, so perhaps I’m just jumping at shadows?