Slashdot Mirror
Photographer Fired For Digitally Altering Photo
bewert writes "A sign of things to come? Is this kind of thing happening without anyone catching it? This short article notes that war photog Brian Walski was fired for combining elements from two photos to make one with 'better composition'.
Here is the 'Editor's Note' detailing the transgression. It's not really highlighted on their front page ;) I wonder how often this type of Photoshopping is done without anyone noticing it? To paraphrase Pink Floyd, "Mother, should I trust the government?"..." Another submitter points out an article examining digitally altered magazine covers. Slashdot has done several stories on unnoticeable digital alterations; here's 1, 2, 3 old stories to peruse.
Or get it from the horses mouth here
but where do you draw the line? I am actually pleasantly surprised that the newspaper did what was necessary ....
Hell, I'm not a journalist, but even I'd know better than to alter a photograph, even if for "artistic reasons".
Either we tolerate "Photoshoping" of *newspaper* photographs (and rightfully doubt every image we see) or we don't. You're suggesting a "it's ok sometimes" approach, where it's OK as long as in someone's opinion the basic message of the photograph isn't altered. Who gets to decide?
This will be (has been?) abused if tolerated.
That's what the big deal is.
Gee, I saw the 3 photographs and really don't see what the big deal is.
Directly from the article:
Journalism ethics forbid changing the content of news photographs, and it is specifically barred in the newspaper's policy.
So, he violated his employers policy, and he exercised bad ethics. Pretty simple...
Doctoring the photo was mildly misinforming. Strange that the standards for seemingly minor misinformation in photos are so high while the standards for far worse examples of print misinformation are nonexistent. For example, did anyone get fired at the Times for reporting that the coalition forces had captured an entire Iraqi infantry division on day 1? What about the chemical weapons factory that was supposed to have been captured on day 4? Or what about all of the stories about the supposed 'SCUD' missiles that Iraq launched on Iraq? All of these stories were blatantly false and yet millions of Americans probably believe they were true...thanks to the misinformation printed by the Times and other American media outlets.
Another example: During his "State of the Union" speech, President Bush referred to 'aluminum tubes' that Iraq was supposedly trying to obtain from some source in Africa for use in constructing nuclear weapons. He then used this information to suggest that nuclear weapons could be used against American cities. Of course, this was also later shown to be completely false by nuclear weapons experts at Lawrence Livermore laboratories in California who pointed out that the 'aluminum tubes' had no use in constructing a nuclear weapon. It was not misinformation by the Times to report what Bush said in his speech (although it was by Bush) but it was a form of misinformation for the Times to then not challenge and correct the mistaken impressions left by President Bush when better factual information became available. The editors at the Times are a colossal bunch of hypocrites. They might as well admit that their standards of reporting on Iraq in the last few months of reporting are little different from Hitler's propaganda rags in the 1930s or the former USSR's Pravda from the 1970s.
both are definitely retouched. The problem with the first one is that the child has been cut in from a darker picture and then they have used blur around the edge of the child which is why the child has a strange black glow around him. Second one has a shadow on ground which isn't being cast by anything and the middle block on the front of the tank has been removed because the missing figure obscured the left half of the block.
Assuming you are looking here, "Waldo" is (I think) a few different people, mainly the guy to the left on the soldiers leg in the top-left photo (the guy looking left who has something red around his neck).
In the top-right photo, the same guy is partially blocked by the soldier, but you can still see his knee and back. On the doctored photo, this guy appears on both the right and left side of the soldier's leg. In addition, there are two people a bit more in the distance behind "Waldo" who also appear to the right and left. Since the angle chanegd slightly between photos, these people were duplicated.
Those three are the only duplicates; the crowd to the right of the soldier in the doctored photo is identical to the crowd in the top-right photo. To the left of the soldier's leg is the crowd as seen in the top-left photo.
It takes a severe cluelessness to draw that conclusion. It's obvious in the soldier's stance that he's not pointing anything at anyone, and furthermore, between his uniform, his weapon, and the supplemental information, he is quite clearly British.
Look behind and infront of the knees of the gunman
I think Bill O'Reilly is a bit busy defending himself from his lies about winning two Peabody awards for Inside Edition.
what? what I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not?
here you go: http://www.uscoles.com/pclens.htm
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Scientology has been caught retro-doctoring photos Stalin style to remove people after they've fallen out of favour, like Reed Slatkin who's in big trouble for a long-running investment ponzi scam.
I hope the press has better ethics than Scientology.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Wasn't a rubber stamp, comparison to photo elsewhere indicates it seems to be a lightening tool to improve visibility of boy. See my comments elsewhere in the thread.
And it is indeed an old photo, of an Israeli tank.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Someone else pointed this out... In the left hand original at this site, there is a guy squatting in the foreground at the bottom left corner of the picture. He's got a red and white bandana around his neck. In the picture on the right, he's now partially obscured by the soldier, but you can see his back just to the right of the soldier's leg. In the composite, you see both.
It becomes fairly obvious when you inspect the crease in his clothes formed by his upper and lower leg, and the pattern of dirt smudged on his knee.
You can tell the photographer changed perspective slightly by noting the position of the blue water cooler. It's pretty much in the middle of the left picture, fairly unobscured. In the right picture, it's now only visible between the arm and leg of the squatting man in the white tunic. Taking that shift in perspective into account, it becomes pretty obvious that the red/white bandana man is in the composite picture twice.
Okay, there have been several comments on this so far but I feel obligated to chime in since digital photo enhancement/adjustment/manipulation is part of my occupation.
The photo, with the boy, is real. Dispite the fact that the selective discoloration appears to be conveniently placed on the tank directly behind him, those things do happen in photography. All the shadows match the lighting angles and the objects in the scene, given that the sun was at a very low angle and the shadows compressed (vertically, extended laterally) by the angle of the photographer. Any manipulation which may have been done is not distinguishable at this resolution.
The boy *removed* is most obviously fabricated for reasons both editorial (with regards to composition) and technical. Technically: the yellow material visible against the structure in the background behind and underneath the tank (which looks to be signage or equipment, it's difficult to make out given the depth of field used) is utterly plagued by a patterned replication, showing unskilled cloning tool usage. The front armor is not only magically repaired in this version, but also has tiles which mirror each other at their joint. The now inexplicable shadow which matched the boy previously remains, and is too sharp to be cast in conjunction with the antenna (or whatever it may be) contributing to the one next to it, even given the vertical/perspective shadow compression which makes this a more forgiving detail.
Editorially, that's *not* the way to shoot a tank. Were it the subject, the depth of field is acceptable but it's too large in frame which would distract from it; the image has also been shot to compress multiple planes of perspective, but the reasoning for that choice is completely devoid from this version. There remains no balance, sense of motion, or romanticism of the elements which would suggest this to be a professional photograph. Given that other talent is still obvious (use of lighting, combination of aperature use even with telephoto for precision DoF control) these omissions make it suspect. It's only when the relationship between tank and boy are present that the photo makes journalistic or artistic sense.
It's like watching one of those "funniest home video" gag ("gag" is an editorial pun here on my part) shows where people start trying to pick apart how the situation could have happened or been staged, without noticing the signs which do not appear in *front* of the camera: filming scenes without significant memorable of photographic content, panning to locations before the action occurs in preparation, etc.
There are multiple ways to tell a fake, and gentlemen I do tell you: the "no boy"'s a hack job.
(As a slight aside, the tank appears to be Israeli given the modern hebrew writing thereon and was not in motion when the photograph was taken)
Any spoon would be too big.
It's not an American tank. It's an Israeli Merkava, I think. Besides the shape of the tank, American tanks don't have reactive armor (explosive plates that are intended to divert the hot plasma jet from HEAT weapons, like anti-tank missles), which is those big blocks you see strewn all over the tank.
you actually misread what the guy said. he was trying to ascertain whether "you" (the slashdot crowd) thought folks that *didn't* use red-eye reduction should be fired. try reading it again.
heaven
Er, that was also the conclusion for the Elian photo, but it still became fodder for anti-Reno propaganda. Thus the original poster's comment is valid.
In each case, since it's a 2-d photo, the exact angle of the gun and the distance to the background characters aren't easily processed by the mind. Knowing whether or not this is a wide-angle perspective is also key to processing this information; if it's wide-angle then objects in the rear are much closer than they appear. With the soldier standing and everyone else seated or crouching, the visual cues needed to determine the fov just aren't obvious.
Ok... red eye reduction removes something that wasn't there originally. Unless the person you took a photograph has bright red eyes you are removing something that the camera artifically inserted into the image.
Not true at all. The back of the eye actually is red. When a bright light is shown directly into the iris, the tissue at the back can be seen. It really is red. You just don't see it because the iris is designed to capture light for viewing not reflect it but a camera flash sends too much light in at once. Hence...redeye.
...quicker, easier, more seductive the darkside is...but more powerful, it is not.
Part of the problem with photography is that a picture on film (or nowadays digital) is not the same as what you see. For any photo, the lightness / darkness is partly subjective to the settings on the camera, and greatly subjective to the person handling processing. "Dodging and burning" or darkening and lightening portions of an image to bring out masked detail is a common practice, and most (99.999% I'd say) photographers consider a dodged and burnt image to be unaltered unless it makes the image appear truly different than the scene it was taken from. Color photos are even more confusing, because the human mind compensates for variations in lighting, while film doesn't (except for built-in biases to certain lights per film). Colors also have to be adjusted during printing using a system of filters.
Photo.net has what I consider an authoritive determination of what is classified as altered, and I suspect for those not familiar with photography, it will give you a bit of an idea about just how subjective a printed image can be, from the type of paper used, to the amount of contrast in the print, to the dodging and burning, and the color compensation... and these are all AFTER exposure considerations. Many more considerations can be made before the exposure!
SIG: HUP
An all too common practice is a video interview technique called the "reaction shot". The way this interview production technique works is when you are interviewing someone, mostly the camera is on the interviewee, but sometimes you want the image to switch back you you while the interviewee is still talking (this is called an "reaction shot"). It can be certainly be used to manipulate the emotions of the viewer (imagine a picture of the interviewer rolling their eyes, or glaring angrily, etc, etc).
When you see this on tv, one might think that there are two cameras and this is a contemporaneous view of you "reacting" while the interviewee is talking, but it isn't usually the case. Most reaction shots are filmed before or after the interview in the studio when the interviewee is not there since usually only one camera is used and the reaction shots are "insert-edited" with a contiguous audio track to lend the appearence of contemporaneous action.
Ahh, the magic of television. Reaction shots are done to improve composition and production values (staring at the interviewee for a long time can make you turn the channel in boredom, and a wide pan with a single camera will get you sick like a ping-pong match). You might say that since the audio track is unedited, this is a fair representation of what occured during the interview, but it's easy to see how this can be a slippery slope. In fact in the hollywood movie, Broadcast News, they have an all too true scene about the reaction shot where William Hurt tries a few times to fake tears to improve a reaction shot.
Although you might think that this "reaction shot" stuff is just a lot of hype, but during the Nixon-Kennedy presidential debates, it's widely thought that the reaction shots of Nixon fidgetting and sweating while Kennedy was talking likely contributed to Kennedy winning the presidency. Polling data taken after the debate seemed to give the edge to Nixon among those who heard the debate on radio, where the tv watchers gave the edge to Kennedy. You can thank Don Hewitt technical director in charge of the television switcher at the debates (who went on to be the executive producer of 60 Minutes).
Here's a quote from a Boston Globe article which explored the question if this type of insert editing was "ethical" journalism. Something to think about when you are watching the evening news...
It's not an American tank. It's an Israeli Merkava, I think. Besides the shape of the tank, American tanks don't have reactive armor (explosive plates that are intended to divert the hot plasma jet from HEAT weapons, like anti-tank missles), which is those big blocks you see strewn all over the tank.
WRONG - IT is an American made tank. M60,
owned by Israeli, who have uparmoured it with
reactive armour. (as u noted correctly)
The tracks are all metal tracks,
unlike the rubber/metal tracks which the US military prefers. (Which is why you may have
thought it was a
Merkava.)
M60 without the reactive armour.
scripsit mindstrm:
My saddest moment in this respect was watching a young waiter at a Cairo restaurant being loundly and, um, colorfully berated (in English, of course) by an American for not being able to bring him A-1 steak sauce. It was 4 July, and they had festooned the place with red-white-and-blue streamers and American flags, and attempted a U.S.-style barbecue, to make the expats feel welcome.
No, actually it was when a Jeep full of drunken Americans pulled into an oasis in the Sahara (eight hour drive to get there, and they'd been drinking the whole way), and proceeded to try to buy people's patio furniture from them. In English. With U.S. dollars. (If you're an American, imagine a drunken Arab stumbling into your house and waving around wads of Saudi rials, urgently demanding something in Arabic.) Unfortunately for me, I not only came from the same country, I knew the guys.
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.