Is it real, or is it Photoshop?
What did the scene really look like? Too many photojournalists have been dodging and burning the heck out of their pictures for too long. It’s not real, and it’s not accurate. But they’re doing it anyway, ethics be damned.
In a wonderful and long-needed blog post, Carrie Niland serves up one educational example (in a real version and a Photoshopped version) and asks us to weigh in on this.
This has been disturbing me for quite a while. I’ll see a professional photojournalist speak to an audience about ethics and accuracy and not faking things, and then I’ll see his work and it’s all Photoshopped to the max, with insanely vibrant colors and extreme light that is totally not the result of “the magic hour.” I see these pictures winning photojournalism awards too, and I just can’t understand why the PJs have not drawn the line closer to reality.
(Via Journerdism and A Photo A Day.)
I looked at these two images and came to the realization why ask why?
In the Mid/late 80’s thru mid 90’s I worked in print when we all still shot film and did our burn and dodge magic in the darkroom - what makes this any different? The technology has changed, but the end result more than likely would have been the same.
If I had shot something like this on neg film and then used the skills I had acquired through trial and error over time to create the same image in a print - would it have been any more close to reality or more pure to the dogma of photojournalism? I don’t believe so - only the technology by which I saw the image and tweaked it in the darkroom has changed. Using Photoshop to achieve this look is not any less pure to manipulating an image in a traditional darkroom.
Film has been used as a palette by which to record our world. When a photographer settled on a film, that photog understood it’s particular characteristics of how it would record a moment in time. There were those who shot Fujichrome for its vibrant colors, other shooters like William Albert Allard or David Alan Harvey shot Kodachrome 25 or 64 for those films characteristics. Still others, like myself, were straight b/w shooters. Why? Because it suited our particular vision of how we recorded the world. It’s a matter of interpretation on what is reality.
No matter what dogmatic purists say, visual journalists are still creative visionaries and should have/be given a certain amount of creative license. Where that line is drawn is quite frankly, subjective.
From my POV, that line wasn’t crossed in the two examples shown. What I saw was the photographers creative vision coming forth - and anyone who works capturing moments in time is typically a creative pattern at heart - why stifle that with rigid dogma that inhibits instead of nurtures creative vision - within the general confines of journalism?
Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
April 15, 2008 at 8:17 ambluprojekt
@Cliff:
I don’t think the argument is whether computers allow more creative freedom than darkrooms did — it’s whether that freedom is potentially damaging to journalistic standards. You seem to think it isn’t, but if photojournalists are allowed to be “creative visionaries,” as you put it, what’s stopping print reporters from giving themselves the same license?
For example: The Photoshopped image of the athletes misleads viewers into thinking they were playing outside at night, not inside a dome. Suppose a reporter covering this event decided it would be more dramatic to write as if the game had taken place outdoors. Would that be acceptable, too? From your point of view, it seems it would be — the reporters, after all, are just exercising their “creative vision.”
I understand the point you’re making about the need to reveal interpretations of the world. But should a photographer permit his personal interpretation to skew the reality of a subject? If so, I can’t help but think he should call himself what he really is — a creative photographer, not a photojournalist.
April 15, 2008 at 8:22 pmMy bible as a student and photojournalist was a book by G. Hurley and Angus McDougall (UofM) called “Visual Impact In Print” 1971 a chapter 12 pages was called Editing the Picture “Out Damed Spot! Out I say. “Subjects like Lights out, Lights in or backround deleted, diluted. Retouching is the handler’s last resort…Most papers had the art departments do the work on the prints…As a photographer I learned to check my backrounds so that would not happen. But it was a common practice, that thankfully the NPPA finally put the brakes on, or at least slowed with their ethics code. As for the mentioned photo taken in a domed arena…maybe it was at nite out and he had taken the picture with a strob to kill the backround light you need the reporter to fill out the story.. its called “Words and Pictures” (by Wilson Hicks) and you need both to tell the real story…..I see the future as a frame grab world from video for the newspaper crowd and the clip for the web.
April 17, 2008 at 12:27 am