----- Original Message ----- From: "John Francis" Subject: Re: When is a little Photoshoppery too much Photoshoppery?
>> Photojournalism is another matter. Your example of the Iranian >> missiles falls into that category. Journalists report news. The >> retouching of a news photograph is unacceptable. >> >> It's simple. > > Not really. Editing in an extra missile is unacceptable, indeed. > But editing out irrelevant distractions (lampposts growing out of > heads, the back of a car that can't be cropped out without losing > an important part of the image, etc.) might be OK. > > My guideline would be "does the editing change the story?" As soon as you start altering the content of a news photograph, you are on a slippery slope. Remove a street lamp here, add in a missile there. It's comes down to what degree of being a liar is OK. It's bad enough that journalists can't be trusted to be impartial, worse if it is accepted that they can add or subtract from an image to make it "better", since as soon as it is accepted that they can alter images in post, it becomes impossible to trust the content of the image, and it becomes impossible to see journalists as anything more than a mouthpiece for the regime that they happen to be allied with. Think CNN, embedded journalists and the fiasco that was called journalism in the Middle East until they caught on that the whole thing was a sham of GWB and the Axis of incompetence. Sorry, this is pretty close to a political diatribe. We can agree to disagree and still be friends, right? William Robb -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
