Post processing & photojournalism

rutt · November 1, 2005

Is there a line here and what is it? Certainly there is a line. Composting Osama bin Ladin and George Bush together into a warm embrace is certainly not ethical photojournalism. Cropping as to show Bush but not they guy he's shaking hands with also seems to be an issue.

But what about color correction? I see lots of shots in the NY Times with obvious easily correctable color casts, tungsten for example.

Here is another example. Last weekend I was out shooting some political events on a cold wet day (first snow of the year). You can look at the threads containing processed shots I posted:

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=21496
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=21524

and the proofsheet containing the out-of-the-camera jpegs and some intermediate processing steps:

http://rutt.smugmug.com/gallery/921929

I really struggled with these, especially some of the shots in front of the Baptist Church. The light from inside was tungsten, very yellow. The light outside was very cold, almost blue. The people outside were cold wet and angry and their faces were well on the way to being purple (magenta/blue). Adding yellow to those faces makes everything else too yellow. Some of my processed shots use complex blends and/or masks to control this.

I lightened up a bit as I went along. I processed the shots in front of the church first and then the ones of the protest marchers. The marchers all used the same formula: only global corrections, A+B steepening with more B than A, some USM. No masking or blends.

The portrait of the cop is different. See here:http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=21420

Opinions? I'm interested in both PJ ethics and also aesthetics.

Sam · November 1, 2005

Rutt,

I'll take a crack at the ethics issue.

Normally when someone askes a question like "is it ethical to (insert question) the answer is NO! If the person asking thought it was ethical there wouldn't be a question.

First a photo of Bill Clinton hugging an alian is absolutely ethical. No one forced him to marry Hillary.

Now on the the more relevent stuff. I can not see why post processing a photo to enhance the visual clarity, color etc. would be considered unethical.

All a camera does, be it film, or digital, is capture reflected light. After this light is captured it must be converted to a format that we can see. This can be done with chemicals, or computers. It can done well or poorly.

Using your cop picture as an example, does it make any material difference to the scene, or what was happing at that moment if his face is a little reder or a little more yellow? I think not.

There is no absolute truth to an unprocessed film negitive or a RAW digital file. Nether can be seen, and there is no absolute standard for processing. Whoever does the processing will make some decisions on what they think it should like like. Not only that but if viewed on different computers, the color / contrast / etc. could be sustaintaly different.

The NY Times probably dosn't have the time or inclination to spend time on exstensive post processing. The photo is in the paper for one day, and gone forever.

It's the hobbiest who takes the extra pains to try for perfection. We don't have a deadline.

Sam

spockling · November 1, 2005

Questions...questions....
I am taking a short course on photography now, 1 evening a week, and I found that for architectural photos, you need to use filters. Taking a picture of an interior of a home you would use a tungsten filter to combat the yellow from the incandescent lights. But the trade off is if there is blue sky outside, it turns really blue (almost distracting). That’s kind of what I found with yours. The yellow from inside the church overpowered the whole scene. If a tungsten filter was used to capture this scene, how much would the rest of picture be changed? I don’t know. So I did a simple mask and applied a blue filter to the interior of the church and tried to balance out the whole picture so as to not emphasize the church (brightest thing). Perhaps that’s why so many photojournalists still shoot B/W?

Now for the ethics of photojournalism,

There are some sites I’ve found,
http://www.poynter.org/subject.asp?id=32

And this one in particular speaks about what a photojournalist is.
A journalist tells a story, a photographer takes pictures of nouns, people etc, and a photojournalist takes the best of both and captures “verbs”
http://markhancock.blogspot.com/1996/01/what-is-photojournalist.html

But to me, it’s about telling a story, and the human face that goes along with it. Photojournalism is something that has really intrigued me lately, particularly because of the impact ONE picture can have. See this http://www.poynterextra.org/Katrina/gallery/index.htm

My problem is, with an event such as a disaster, where does a photojournalist draw the line between helping someone and getting the story. Do you take the picture and then help (if you can) or? You’re there to do a job, but can you turn your back (if only for a 1./60 of a second)?

Hope this makes sense…

mercphoto · November 1, 2005

Sam wrote:

First a photo of Bill Clinton hugging an alian is absolutely ethical. No one forced him to marry Hillary.

ROTFL! Man, I laughed so hard that hurt!

I'm not sure where the lines blur for photojournalistic ethics. Witness the USA Today photo of Condi that was altered to make her eyes so white she looked demonic. I'm convinced that alteration was so severe it had to be intentional but I got blasted on another forum for saying so, so I won't repeat that here.

But that photo was obviously over the line.

I guess I would be fine with color correction if it gets the photo closer the way the colors are seen by the human eye. But that sounds awful subjective to me which makes me uneasy with that line in the sand. One could say "do nothing to the photo" but we all know that is actually impossible, as even the camear does 'something' to the image based on white balance settings, sharpening and contrast settings, etc.

I think cloning is definitely out of the question. Cropping? Well, you can crop in-camera with your zoom or your feet. You could hide who Bush was shaking hands with, for example, when you press the shutter button easy enough. I think cropping happens quite often, actually, to make a photo fit the available space on the page and I think that is fine to do. Color correction? I don't know why that would be bad but I guess in cases it could be.

rutt · November 1, 2005

Steve, I like your edit quite a lot. I'm going to revisit this shot someday, perhaps. I did some pretty hairy blends to get a similar effect with some other shots from the series, as you may have noticed. The shot with the man inside holding the sign, that was a thing and a half because the inside was lit by tungsten and the white sign was lit by the bluish snowstorm light.

ian408 · November 1, 2005

I think edits for color correction and sharpening are fine. As is resizing the
image for a specific purpose (read "crop" for a magazine piece or something).
Manipulating the image to remove or add what is or wasn't there, no good
and a firing offence.

Ian

StevenV · November 2, 2005

rutt wrote:

I see lots of shots in ...

There are some pubs where their rule is easy - Absolutely No Editing of any sort; they want to (appear) be "completely objective."

I'd say there's no such thing - as an individual a photographer "edits" even when they don't want to, just by deciding what to photograph, from what angle, what/who gets cropped in the viewfinder, which shots to submit, etc. The great question of objectivity in journalism is often debated and will probably never really be answered. Again, we're talking about People writing/photographing/reporting; those people each have their own personal views and know (or think they do) the views of their employers, the advertisers in the pub, the readers, etc.

As a consumer of news it's therefore important to be aware of it; I wouldn't expect the same story to be told the same way by Fox, CNN, NPR, the NY Times, Washington Post, Washington Times... or even any given two of them.

Anyway... right now the pictures I send to the newspapers are all of High School sports - thankfully there's no belief that there's any reality or objectivity in that subject

but I don't do a bunch of work on 'em, I crop & color correct to show the players, period.

And no, I don't show the quarterback throwing a pass to Bill Clinton.

Andy · November 2, 2005

The NYTimes had to pull the online pic of new Supreme Court Nominee the other day, he had an awful blue-cast. This sort of thing is inexcusable, they should either fix it, or if their PJ rules prohibit that, then don't publish! IMO, this is the sort of fix that should be done, no ethical worries here at all.

Post processing & photojournalism

Comments