RE: [Leica] fired for photoshopping

[Tim Atherton <tim@KairosPhoto.com>]

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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