Photoclubalpha

David's latest headline. At the end it says "leave a comment" but I don't subscribe to Facebook, Twitter or Google or any other potentially abhorrent forum so I'll comment here.
You provide 4 examples.
The first one with a modicum of adjustment to a portion of the image, perfectably acceptable.
The other three, your results are NOT the image you took. Cropping is O.K. Agjusting anything to do with the image exposure is O.K. within reason. Removing any bit of the image that "you don't want" is unacceptable.
The final three are lies. Nothing more nothing less. Submit them wherever you like, they're still not a true image.

My thoughts on the subject are that it depends totally on the venue. For example in Natgeo, some cropping and exposure adjustments and not much else would be acceptable. In a photo/art contest, let it be what the creator of the contest wants. For someone's studio, it's dependent on what he wants. But no matter what, removing/adding/rearranging elements should be made known when it happens.

On a side note:
My Dad took a photo years ago in the Tetons. It was at a campground but he walked around until he found a spot where every car, camper, telephone pole, building, etc. was behind a tree, bush rock hill, etc. The un-edited photo told a lie. It said that man was not there. He manipulated all man-made objects away from the photo by simply changing his position. For a scenic picture of the area, it was beautiful. For an ad to go somewhere away from it all, it would've been a lie.

Just my $.02

I think the key thing in the Steve McCurry case is how the images were portrayed. He used to describe himself as a photo journalist. I think this reduces your leeway in manipulating the image if you are using it to tell your story.

Making an image for the sake of the image I think is completely different. In this case it is art and the photographer uses everything at their disposal to represent their vision. I think all of DK's images are fine as the attempt was not to mislead but to make a better picture.

I think the most damning thing for Steve McCurry is that he has very publicly critised others for Photoshopping in the past. It is not the act that bothers me, it is the duplicity.

I guess I don't care all that much what Steve does using PS, but one thing that was very interesting to me is that I now understand how so many of his photos from around the world just look so perfect. As you know, I travel a lot and photograph a lot. In real life there are wires, trash, signs for Coca-Cola, advertisements for mobile phones, mix of people in both traditional garb and western t-shirts, utility poles, etc. Now I know that Steve makes extensive, extreme use of PS and also stages some of his photos (even using models) so that is why they look so good. And a staff of PS experts doing some of the work for him. I don't mind that he does it, but it makes me feel much, much better about my own photos.

I almost never do much with regards to cloning, etc. in PS. If I do it is usually really minor stuff. For the last 4.5 years I have been using LR and it doesn't do a good job with cloning so I just skip it. I could send the file off to PS to do it, but that creates a huge 16-bit tiff file that gets retained and is a lot of trouble to go through. If I was trying to sell photos though I would probably do it a bit more. Or if I was going to make a big print then I might also.

This morning here in Japan I am still preparing some of my Bali photos from our recent month there. No, I don't plan to do any PSing to them, just use LR for all of them. No doubt with the kinds of extreme PSing Steve does though some of them could be made much, much better in a Steve sort of way!

Refugee Photo Fail

I guess this was a recent photo used as "news". Cropping used to lie, I suppose.

The answer is on the output: if the photo goes to be publish as "news" or "reportage", alteration on PS is unacceptable. For illustration (like the market DK sell to through Alamy) is OK if you state the photo was digitally modified. For the rest, photographers do whatever they want.
In any case, as Babuko shown on the "refugee's" meme, the media plays a big part on this game. I was reading last Sunday a series of articles about Robert Capa, specially focused on the D-Day photos he took and how misleading captions helped creating a myth around him (myth that was used by him, Magnum, Time Magazine and the media in general in order to sell more...) I'll try to find the links to those articles at home...

So, this is the post Inwas talking about:
http://www.nearbycafe.com/artandphoto/p ... e-mccurry/
And from here you can read about the Robert Capa "myth"
http://www.nearbycafe.com/artandphoto/p ... -on-d-day/

pakodominguez wrote:So, this is the post Inwas talking about:
http://www.nearbycafe.com/artandphoto/p ... e-mccurry/

That was very interesting. Lots of inside baseball knowledge of the background with regards to McCurry, NatGeo, Magnum, etc.

pakodominguez wrote: And from here you can read about the Robert Capa "myth"
http://www.nearbycafe.com/artandphoto/p ... -on-d-day/

All the brouhaha about McCurry, Capa, and others just makes me feel so much better about my own photography. It is sort of like women who can get unrealistic expectations of how their body should look based on women in fashion magazines, movie stars, etc. Those women often have had plastic surgery and have gone to other extraordinary means to get themselves looking the way they do and then on top of that Photoshop is often used extensively on their photos. A woman who has tried for a long time to achieve similar looks by dieting, exercise, etc. must be thrilled when she learns that her objects of admiration are to a large degree the result of plastic surgery and Photoshop. Now that I know how much goes on with many of the famous photos from big names that we see I feel rather thrilled about my own meager photos.

bakubo wrote: All the brouhaha about McCurry, Capa, and others just makes me feel so much better about my own photography... Now that I know how much goes on with many of the famous photos from big names that we see I feel rather thrilled about my own meager photos.

Absolutely.

Yeah.