Re: [Leica] Cropping dilema

[Eric Welch <eric@jphotog.com>]

That's not the same thing as adding to what doesn't exist in the photo.

It is self-evident that no matter how you tilt or crop a photo that 
what is left was something the photographer intended to include in the 
photo. There is nothing wrong with cropping, as long as its done 
honestly. There's nothing wrong with tilting. News photographers some 
times have to, or accidentally, tilt the camera to get everything in at 
the right distance from the subject. But in the journalism world, we 
have rules and one of them is that you don't add to a photo something 
that wasn't there on the film at the time of the exposure.

Adjusting tone and color is cool too, since film is never an analog of 
exactly what the scene appeared like. The honest photographer tries to 
show how the situation looked as closely as possible to the real 
experience of being there within the two-dimensional representation of 
the scene we call a photograph.

Do not add. Period. For journalism and documentary work. For the rest, 
let your conscience by your guide, but stretches of rationalization 
don't count.

On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 02:43  PM, feli2@earthlink.net wrote:

> Would you also object to rotating the shot on an enlarger and cropping 
> it? The shot of the napalm girl that was discussed last week was 
> heavily cropped. If he had also tilted it, would that be considered 
> objectionable? If the crop/tilt would have NOT changed the content of 
> the shot or the journalistic integrity of the recorded event, would 
> that still be a bad thing?

Eric Welch
Carlsbad, CA
http://www.jphotog.com

AAAAAA - American Association Against Acronym Abuse Anonymous

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