>>[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >>No photojournalist I know shoots Raw
>Well, I know they all do in North Carolina! >Did you hear the fuss last year about Patrick Schneider of the Charlotte >Observer being stripped of several awards because of excessive Photoshop >manipulation of several images? It made the national news briefly. The >verified the manipulation by comparing the published images to the RAW >files the paper keeps in its archives. It seems that all their >photographers are required to shoot RAW and archive the RAW files before >converting to another format for level/color adjustment and subsequent >publication. Apparently this has been the paper's policy for years. I >can't believe that other major newspapers have lower standards of >ethics, especially after last year's fuss. Perhaps other papers simply have a different way of handling their code of ethics. Most papers I know of explain their standards and police themselves, but nobody I know around here is this paranoid. Folks just know that it is a serious offense to manipulate photos unethically and that the paper will act accordingly if they are caught cheating. Our own little four-man photo staff doesn't have ANY formal archiving system, explicit ethics policies, etc. Honestly nobody else at the paper knows enough about the specifics to implement such controls. There is simply an understanding about what behaviour is professionally acceptable. I suspect that the local big boys don't worry about their shooters manipulating things because some picture desk editor does everything but the actual shooting. For little guys, there isn't enough management to do that kind of checking up and archiving. If a guy is transmitting from the field then you pretty much have to trust him, and I think this is how most newspapers handle it. Remember when that guy got canned for compositing two photos he shot in the field in Iraq? I don't think that they caught him by checking his photo against some archived copy. They caught him because some of their clients questioned the photo. When I first got my D1h, I asked around to see what settings people were using, and everybody said "JPEG Hi". I remember discussing file formats with some guys a couple years back and they basically said that they went out of JPEG into TIFF or something immediately when they put the photo in the computer or burned it to CD just to avoid JPEG lossyness. The new Nikon D2h apparently has better quality in raw mode than in JPEG mode (unlike the *istD which apparently is the other way around, and unlike the D1h where it is a draw) and this apparently really bothers some guys. It messes up their workflow, slows them down, etc. If that is the case, they must have been JPEGging before now. I'm filling up cards pretty fast at JPEG Hi, so raw would be a terrifying space hog. DJE
