Ethics: Digital PJ's

http://www.photography​-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=45895

I'm very happy to finally have a shot in the paper but there is one thing that bugs me about this shot.


The kid in the backround is going to hate how he looks in the photo and it could have easily been fixed in PS. Simply plop someones eyes where his should have been.

Thoughts.

Unethical in my opinion. Besides, it's not that bad.

It is what it is and that's the way it should be shown. (Period).

it will simply teach the kid to never blink his eyes again...

So much for artistic photographs - Bummer.


BTW, I am assuming you are speaking to photojournalism - not photography as a whole.

Absolutely. That is what I meant. PJ is a whole different world and very boiler-plate. I doubt I could handle it without my head exploding.

Think of it as news vs movies.

You report news where you create movies.

They both have their place, yet are very differnt.

After thinking about this for a little longer i realized that changing somehting like the eyes may not seem like a big tihng, but now its adding eyes. Then adding a ball. Then adding a scoreboard in the backround for dramtic effects.


Thanks for the session Dr.'s you helped me work through this

Hey Timmy,

Congrats on the photo. It looks great seeing your name in print doesn't it?

I do more staged editorial shots myself and there is always editing: removing product labels or other small things, that can not appear in the magazine. But for a news shot leave it the way it is, that is the story and the capture and thus the way i think it should be shown.

Cheers,

You're telling me!!! It is insane. ALl the pictures I take are the same and the moment you deviate they tell you they want the plain boring shot. When you flip through the magazine you see a researcher holding soybeans, then a researcher holding something else. It is always a person hold the product they are working on! I suggested that they just take one photo and I would edit the product in for them.

On the other hand I really think that alittle creativity would go along ways with this magazine so I am starting to slip creative working in with the boiler-plate, hoping that they might do something alittle different.

Editorial usage photos should never, ever, ever be editted for content.
Graphical work on the other hand may be edited if it is represented that way. This is a big issue....Take the recent LA Times photog who doctored a shot from Iraq to be a little better....he got canned for it.

It is very tempting to fix little things in PS but resist the urge.

I had this same conversation with my publisher last night. I got a shot of the MD Republican Headquarters with some activity out front yesterday. There was a woman in the shot about to light a cigarette. I asked if it was ethical to photoshop it out of her hands. He (my publisher) told me a story of a Pulitzer prize winning photo that was altered and all the controversy around it. When it ran there was no Coke can in the shot, but when it was displayed for winning, the can was in there.

-Nick

Just hope he lives in a nice town... In this place no one would ever let you forget about a picture like that.

Once you have had a great shot ruined by a distracting item in the shot, you will find yourself paying closer attention to the whole frame. Not to say everyone doesn't. But I just recently shot some pics of a preacher at the pulpit. In the shot I liked the most of all the frames, I had to crop tighter than I liked because the alter kid was looking right at me, with a less than excited look on her face. Not good, when you are trying to make the preacher look good. Kinda like that shot of President Bush with the bored kid in the background making faces.

That actually came up for me at work today. I'm a journalism student, and I run our campus paper's Web site. Part of my job is taking our print-run photos and formatting them for the web in Photoshop, stuff like adusting color balance, sharpening, resizing, etc.

Our production manager is a professional journalist and photographer for a local paper, so I asked her if it was okay to edit out a lens flare, to which she said no.

I asked why, and she told me the general rule of thumb she used was that you shouldn't do anything in Photoshop that you couldn't do in a darkroom. Clone-stamping out a lens flare was out, but it would be okay to color-balance the picture to make it more vibrant, for example. When I asked her why a lens flare had to stay, she said that it was basically the 'slippery slope' arguement, where do you end?

Makes sense to me.

I agree in large with the do not edit policy, most of my shots are staged portraits or such so editing is allowed.

However, the old slippery slope cop-out never cuts it. For starters it is not a valid argument... period. I believe technically it is confusing corelation and causation. For instance, one could say about pot that it leads to harder drugs because a large number of hard drug users have used pot. By the same logic those hard drug users probably also drink water, will anyone ever say that water leads to hard drug use?? Not likely. If editing is bad lets figure out why and draw the lines accordingly.

Just ranting about a philosophical pet peeve. Now don't get me started on begging the question!