Hundreds of press photographers descended on New Scotland Yard to protest at a new law by doing what they do best - by lining up en masse and taking pictures of police officers; in other words, breaking the very law they are demonstrating against.
From today, anyone taking a picture of a police officer can be deemed as having a committed a criminal offence.
Section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act is a new law that allows the arrest of anyone found "eliciting, publishing or communicating information" relating to members of the armed forces, intelligence services and police officers, which is "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism".
If a link to terrorism can be proved, this means that anyone taking a picture of these people face a fine or jail sentence of up to ten years.
The National Union of Journalists therefore gathered together for a mass picture-taking protest, to highlight their demands for the right to take photographs in public places, a "precious freedom" that organiser John Toner says must be safeguarded.
"Police officers are in news pictures at all sorts of events," he told the BBC. "Football matches, carnivals, state processions - so the union wants to make it clear that taking their pictures is not the act of a criminal."
The new law has created all sorts of obstacles and loopholes: the Royal Family are members of the armed forces, so should the law stringently apply to them? Some police officers even wrongly believe that they have the right to delete images from photographers' cameras.
A government spokesperson said that, while there were no legal restrictions on taking pictures in public places, "the law applies to photographers as it does to anybody else".
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