Gregory wrote -- >Staging allows one to add the elements that he or she (as >photographer or editor) feel supports their interpretation of the >facts. Nothing should to be in the image they do not like. Remember >the photo editor that altered license plates on a photo of a gathering >of the KKK? >Tsk, tsk. I'll bet you've never shot a KKK cross-burning, or you would understand. I have, and before you are allowed in, they make some things scintillatingly clear as conditions for granting permission to photograph. One of them is no license plates (for reasons that should be too obviously "duh" for me to have to explain, I hope). The editor faced an ethical dilemma, in that he wanted to run the picture, yet abide by the terms of the verbal contract. What he did allowed him to do both. Just a bit of down-to-earth human engineering, nothing more. >I recently made a well known nature photographer mad at me. Damn, you almost sound proud of this.... > I made my disgust known about advice in one of his NON-FICTION, >books about shooting nature images. He voiced his pleasure (no, not >Art Wolfe, yet another shooter) at the ability of photoshop to >remove an unwanted tree or Hiway from his images. I suggested he >accept the loss rather than alter the truth. or at least try to shoot it >over if possible instead of altering the truth. Anything but alter the >truth. >He will not respond to me anymore claiming I am closed minded. This sounds like T.F., a very nice guy whom I met on the Anhinga Trail, who certainly would not tell YOU to apply his ethics to your images. He has better things to do with his time than lock horns with people like you telling him what HE ought to be doing. Apparently, he is a sharp judge of human character. >How many know Mr. Wolfe himself has altered images, the real shots >just were not good enough. AW developed with Galen Rowell a system for indicating which images have had major elements added/substracted. If you own one of his books, you will see a little symbol (a triangle, I think) beside the picture to indicate this. No more liberty than a painter or illustrator would take, and no deception. >We are, as a general rule, apparently unable to accept some >weakness in an image because of a natural cause and effect. We >MUST manipulate life itself, we do not seem to be able to accept life a >s life, it just isn't good enough. Interesting, the use of the rhetorical "We" while excluding oneself. >What's the harm of moving one little >tree or blemish or add a pretty person, because the one in the real >photo or scene just wasn't pretty enough? >Tsk, tsk. Our Father Ansel did it too, liberally hacking bushes that were in the way, and if you knew photo-history, you would know this argument was new in the mid-to-late 1800's. PH Emerson wrote a great essay on the ethics of moving a tree in a landscape. -- Luis
