justruss
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 p.4 #20 · Photojournalism and altering photos | |
drofnad wrote:
How would this stand up to a different excuse, where that caddy got reduced
to "really nice bokeh" by some wonderful fast glass: should the photog. be fired,
and ruefully explain, "well, I was just showing ButchM & Justruss my new lens at f/0.8,
and then mistook aperture as f/8.0 when taking the shot ...".
Insisting that photos be "unaltered" (and that has some weasle-ness to it,
given all the effects that can come by-camera alone) so that they give the
honest though tenuous representation of reality is somewhat ironic, no?
-drofnad
Are you saying that you think this isn't much difference from blowing out the background with fast glass?
If so, I disagree. Mostly.
The reason fast glass isn't considered "altering" the photo is that if one is going to use a camera for documentary purposes, one must realize that the closest you can get to "reality" is a flat version of a three dimensional scene, a crop from the larger scene, from a single perspective, with all the optical qualities of glass and capturing substrate (noise, dof, blurring effects, etc).
To say that these things preclude a photo from being documentary-- would preclude the use of photography in general for documentary purposes. But, when we see a photo-- as obvious as this may sound-- we KNOW that it is a photo, and limited in its documentary capacity by the very facts of the medium.
Removing the caddy is a different level of "unreality"-- the reader cannot know, unless he is told, that parts of the image have been removed after the fact. He is no longer looking at an image made within known limits (those aspects of photography), but an image that no camera could have even shot... and then looking not at a vanilla photo, but at an illustration made from photographic parts.
The reason I said "mostly" is that some combination of TINY dof, massive lens induced blur, AND misleading headline/caption could also deceive the readership into thinking one thing is going on when in fact another thing was going on. This could also be achieved by cropping, adjusting exposure, etc.... all things that are kosher when done to adjust the scene to accurately portray the reality of when the photography took the image. But all not considered kosher when done to change the meaning/reality of what the image portrays.
So your two examples-- the caddy removal in photoshop, and the blurring via lens-- are very different categories. One is always "wrong" to do in journalism, the other is unavoidable in photography, mostly isn't an issue because in general photo editors would be firing photographers who didn't stop down to provide context in their images, and because blurring is one of the truths in photography (as is cropping... considering a 50mm lens approaches human "perspective" but not FOV, and when we use our eyes we get blurring too) it is considered "part of the medium."
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