Re: [Leica] fired for photoshopping

[Steven Alexander <alexpix@worldnet.att.net>]

All of Tim's comments are true, in the old days....I heard editors ask the
ART Dept. to air brush that distracting background or touch up that face. As
photographers or the darkroom technicians always attempted to make the best
possible print.  We cropped to fit layout and/or to improve composition, but
in all this alteration I never saw or experienced the creation on an image
from several others for the purpose of news dissemination.

All photographs represent the view point of the photographer and this
viewpoint is presented to the public through the mind set of the editors. It
is always your truth; however, it should always be the true representation
of that moment in time.  Still to assemble an illustration to represent a
single moment in time is wrong...lying...immoral...untruthful...wrong in the
news context.

Because we now have tools that allow such manipulations with such ease there
is still an obligation to offer truthful representation on moments in time
even though we understand that those representation have been filtered
through the points of view of several people and may have been edited to
correct color, remove noise or otherwise cleaned up...BUT NOT to create an
illustrate of what might have been or what better demonstrates a point of
view.  


Happy snaps,
Steven Alexander







on 4/4/03 9:11 AM, bdcolen at bdcolen@earthlink.net wrote:

> Unfortunately, Tim, you're probably right.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
> [mailto:owner-leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us] On Behalf Of Tim
> Atherton
> Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2003 7:31 PM
> To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
> Subject: RE: [Leica] fired for photoshopping
> 
> 
> In a way, what we are talking about is "Photoshop Creep"
> 
> It goes something like this:
> 
> In the "old" days it was just black and white - if you were lucky, and
> the deadline wasn't too tight, you could play with the image a bit -
> different contrast paper. darken the skies a bit , do a bit of dodging
> here and there to make the picture feel a bit more like you thought it
> should look.
> 
> Then came colour and you couldn't do much with it, but pretty soon,
> along came Photoshop and desktop scanners.
> 
> The colour processing was often not that great, so now you could clean
> up some of those horrid spots with the wonderful little "rubber stamp"
> tool - boy was that cool.
> 
> And you could alter the colour and saturation a bit again. Make it look
> a bit more how you think it should.
> 
> And Photoshop's so cool you can fool around with it - stick the editors
> head on the body of that huge fat guy you did a story on who was so big
> they had to take the wall of his house down to get him out. That one
> sure looked funny stuck on the office wall.
> 
> But every now and then when no-one was looking, you got rid of that
> telegraph pole that stuck out of the top of some kids head, or that
> disembodied hand that somehow got in the edge of that great picture (hey
> - in the "old" days you would have just cropped it anyway right?)
> 
> And then they went all digital and it became even easier. No more
> sitting there scanning - just do everything on the desktop. No-one even
> knows that the original had those annoying power lines were there in the
> sky or not - and you only do it every now and then, just to improve
> things. Just like taking out the odd dust spot from the CCD.
> 
> The pay is really crap, the competitions tight and you probably had to
> pay for most of this really expensive digital gear out of your own
> pocket anyway. So, if you can just touch things up every now and then to
> make the picture sing a bit more (as the "manipulated" picture in
> question does, compared to the other to), then go ahead and do it - it's
> not really that much different than Don McCullin printing his skies so
> dark and ominously in every picture it looks like it's just about to
> rain. Sure, most of the time, it's dust, and sharpening and colour and
> contrast, maybe the odd wire or lamppost. But occasionally, just getting
> rid of something a bit more obvious, or moving something just a bit
> (after all, the photograph itself is artificial - an inhuman 1/250th of
> a second - everyone was moving anyway) - if it somehow makes the picture
> just that bit better.
> 
> NOW - if you don't think something like this is happening in almost
> every newsroom in the country, you're fooling yourself. It's never
> really talked about, but everyone knows it goes on, to some degree or
> another.
> 
> tim
> 
> 
> 
> 
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