 Steven Chaitoff |
Digital Manipulation Part 2!!! Hey what do you think of this: You want to take a picture of a dark shadowy building with a bright sky overhead, but there's too much contrast in the scene. So you take two identical shots -- one metered on the building with a blown out sky & one metered on the blue sky with an underexposed building. Then you Photoshop the good sky to the good building for the final version. Is that ethical as an upstanding law-abiding photographer?
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John A. Lind |
It's situational . . . (a) How will it be used? (b) What's the photograph's purpose (what are you trying to portray)? (c) In what context will it be presented to others (what will their general expectations be). (d) How will it be presented to others? Don't feel compelled to answer these here . . . just think about them. A couple of notes: For a more recent photo . . . one that ran on the front page of the L.A. Times . . . the staff photographer of about 6 years was fired for merging two photos together of the same scene, shot mere seconds apart, depicting the same exact activity of the same people from the same perspective together. Purpose? To make it more compelling and interesting. Otherwise it didn't change much what was being portrayed or reported. Within the professional world, one must be very, very cognizant about the four questions I asked and contemplate them seriously before manipulating a photograph . . . beforehand with stage-managing it or afterward with darkroom/photoshop manipulation. Reputations have been destroyed, Pulitzer Prizes pulled, and jobs lost over making the wrong decisions. -- John Lind
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Damian P. Gadal |
If it's trying to portray what the eye can see but what the camera can't capture (which I think the question is about), then this wouldn't be that much different than a double exposure with film to properly get a full in a shot...
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- Gregory LaGrange Contact Gregory LaGrange Gregory LaGrange's Gallery |
I've read that Eugene Smith was very upset over how life mag handled his essay on Albert Schweitser, so it may have been the mag that did the changes instead of Eugene Smith. But for the question, if somebody ask how you got everything to come out, you going to say you photoshopped it?
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John A. Lind |
Smith was . . . he had a love/hate relationship with Life Magazine and after finally parting ways with them permanently he went to work for Magnum . . . and nearly bankrupted them with his enormous NYC project that never seemed to get finished while turning down paying work. Smith wouldn't let *anyone* do his darkroom work, kept what he did in the darkroom very closely guarded, and was notorious for *insisting* his photos be published as he delivered them (no cropping/doding/burning by the publication). It's pretty well documented that he (Smith) doctored the Schweitzer photo. He was about the only Life photographer that they consistently let do everything himself . . . and get away with his rantings and ravings about publishing exactly as delivered to them. Apparently a common mode for Life was using the negatives and preparing things for publication themselves using their own staff. On another note . . . National Geographic finally "came clean" not to long ago admitting they had significantly altered their a number of their cover photos over a period of years . . . ostensibly to make them fit the vertical format of their cover including the text overlay. They have since established a policy of no longer doing that to repair their image and retain their credibility. A couple of the alterations removed area between significant elements in the original photographs to make them narrower and I guess some bright folks who had seen the same places realized it was impossible to make a photograph with some of the things in them appearing that close together. -- John Lind
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