Kevin's Petition

[Steve Siegel]

In case some of you do not check the other UWOL forum (at the bottom of the Home Page) and have not seen the plea for the petition to stop harassing videographers filming in US national parks, Google this phrase "Allow Professional Videography on Public Lands".

Kevin and others have been working very hard on this legislation, which will stop the government from charging ridiculous fees and making impossible rules for videographers who try to film in the parks. Still photographers seem to be exempt.

So far the petition only has 143 signatures, and needs a whole lot more to be persuasive. Please check it out.

[Bryce Comer]

Hi Steve,
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I just signed the petition & was very surprised to see i was still only number 144!!
Come on fellow UWOLers, lets all get behind this. While i can understand the need for the fees & a park ranger to oversee a big production, most of us would be no more harmful to the environment than any pro photographer so why should we be treated any differently.
I hope to visit Yellowstone this year or next & hopefully by then i will not have any issues pulling my camera out while i'm there.

Regards,

Bryce

[Kevin Railsback]

Well, it's actually Alex Chamberlain that started the petition. He's been working really hard in Utah to make a change.

But what's most disturbing is an email I got from a photographer that shot some video and was contacted by Yellowstone that he needed a permit in the future. So the park was actually searching the internet looking for park footage and seeing if the people had a permit or not.

The history of the current law was designed for large scale productions that taxed park resources and stepped outside the bounds of what the general public could do. But the parks as well as BLM has interpreted that as any of us with a video camera will be treated the same as Steven Spielberg with the exception of not having to pay a location fee. Still have to have a permit and in many cases a ranger escort which is paid by the hour as well as a million dollar liability policy.

It all started when I tried to go on a tour with a Nat Geo photographer friend of mine. He could shoot all the photos he wanted for profit yet I had to have the permit, the ranger escort at $65 an hour and the insurance policy as well as an itinerary of where I would be and when just to shoot video to put up on my website.

[Lorinda Norton]

Seven hours after Bryce posted and I'm number 145. Pretty slow going! I've got a hard copy petition for a different cause and have had a difficult time gaining twenty signatures. If I had a signature for every time I've heard, "Once the camel's nose is in the tent it's just a matter of time before you have the whole camel," I'd be done. But in this case the camel is already in and needs to be pushed back out!

[Chris Hurd]

That article I had promised in the other thread is finally nearing completion, now that NAB is over. We're going to jump-start this thing with a switch to a much better petition platform -- one that can be embedded directly into the article -- and then we'll take it from the top again.