Without hard guidelines people will alter important new content, either by intention or innocent ignorance. Alteration is simply too easy and too useful, either for reasons of aesthetics or agenda.
A very good post on T.O.P. titled Don’t Make News. A take on the recent furore on edited newspaper photos, with some interesting points that might not be immediately obvious.
Well what with all the noise about ethics in photojournalism going around lately, Sports Shooter has decided to start a column about photojournalism ethics. The first column is aptly titled: Gray Matters: What is real?
Go read it, look like it could be an interesting feature.
If you hadn’t heard about Allan Detrich, and his editing of a photo to do with the Bluffton Baseball tragedy, then you obviously haven’t been reading your photography news for the last few days.
This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has been found, and it certainly won’t be the last, photo shopping becoming something of a second nature to many of us. Not being a photo journalist, I can clone and heal to my hearts content, the final image’s look being the only concern. The life of the photo journalist isn’t so easy however; unlike their literary counterparts (who seem to be able to get away with a hell of a lot of massaging of the truth), the photo journalist is still held to a very high ideal. It makes sense in a way, people usually realise that what they read should be taken with a grain of salt; however the general perception is still that a “photo doesn’t lie”.
The fact that these photo journalists that are caught get fired, may seem to be a bit harsh. The edits have almost always been minor cosmetic changes, and it would be easy to say that there was no harm in them. Still, if you allowed some editing of photos, the huge grey area that would result would rapidly push photo journalism into an arena about as factually true as the opinions column on the last page of a cheap tabloid.
The Online Photographer (a brilliant blog, read it!), has a post well worth the read.
I find with my photography, I always want to know everything about everything. Of course there isn’t enough time in the day, so I end up knowing very little about anything. I have my digital camera, which I am very happy with; though of course I need a whole bunch of new lenses (I still go out and take photo’s with the ones I have, so don’t say it!). I really do mean to get around to fixing my old Voigtlander f7.7, of course a year on from starting some research into that, I am still no further. And of course now I have definitely decided that I am going to get myself a large format camera. I’ve been lurking on eBay and have decided I would dearly love an 8×10 Deardorff, or maybe even a 17×7 Korona; yet some realism kicks in and says a new, or nearly new, Tachihara 4×5 may be a better learning tool as my introduction to large format.
Of course my job, that thing that would pay for all this, takes up far to much time, and in the end I don’t have time to buy anything. So I take some photos when I can and just generally enjoy myself, and Mike is 100% right, it’s all good!
