David Cameron is the video blogging conservative candidate who would like to replace Tony Blair as UK Prime Minister. Rick Segal and I were with Ewan McIntosh on the streets of Edinburg when the nattily dressed Cameron and his well-coiffed entourage started working the sidewalk for votes.
Understanding a photo op when he sees one, he squatted to shake hands and chat with a street indigent as the tanned Cameron's web-camera rolled. The candidate then left the street guy without dropping so much as a pence in his direction.
What my camera did not catch was the ensuing sequence. As Cameron strolled away, he scowled, then wiped his shaking hand on the seat of his well-pressed pants.
Ewan did however, and that is where the global neighborhoods part comes in. That morning, as Rick and I spent a pleasant 50 minutes on the train to Glagow, Evan showed me a couple of websites of note. One was webcameron. The other belonged to Kyle MacRae founder of Scoopt, a service that sells citizen journalist photos to traditional media publishers.
Later, we met with Kyle, an ex-journalist who got the idea for scoopt after the tsunami and London Tube explosions. I like the idea because Scoopt gives citizen journalists the opportunity to actually make a few dollars from being in the right place at the right time with the right exposure setting.
The Cameron incident was one of those right times. There had been a lot of digital clicking going on. Ewan pinged his photo story to Kyle, who today offered one similar to mine up as his Scoopt Photo of the Day.
The lesson for Cameron and the rest of us: there are many cameras in many places. The perspective you want is not necessarily the one you'll get.
